EPUB DIRECT, a digital publishing services provider, has raised €1.3 million in new equity funding which it will use to develop its technology further and create jobs.
The round was led by the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, managed by NCB Ventures. It is understood this group provided close to €1 million of the total investment. Extra funds were sourced from Enterprise Ireland and Hannah Kiely, an experienced business expansion scheme (BES) investor based in Galway.
EPub Direct provides ebook distribution services including administration and billing, allowing publishers to sell their titles in digital formats. Chief executive Gareth Cuddy said the attraction for publishers is the range of channels to market that ePub Direct can access. It supplies 116 online retailers including Amazon, the iTunes store and Waterstones, and more than 15,500 online libraries.
The firm launched officially at the London Book Fair in April this year and already has 45 clients on four continents, including some of the largest publishers and book distributors in Ireland and the UK.
“Out of the top 20 publishers worldwide, we would have four currently. In a UK context, we probably have three of the top 10. By next summer we’ll have somewhere around 30 per cent of the Ireland and UK ebook market,” he said.
EPub Direct employs seven people in Cork and plans to use the investment to create up to 23 extra jobs in the next three years. The funds will also be used to increase research development and expand sales in the UK and internationally.
The company was originally intended to be an ebook retail website when formed in 2009. From discussions with publishers it became clear that many had no strategy for moving to digital.
“We pivoted the company early, and we were already moving towards the publisher services side of the business,” Cuddy said.
As a result, the company spent all of 2010 in research development, creating its own technology to take books in PDF format from publishers and produce them as ebooks for sale online and for download to devices such as the Amazon Kindle.
While some larger publishers may ultimately look to deal directly with online stores, Cuddy said the rapid change in the ebook market makes it worthwhile for many publishers to deal with an aggregator instead of signing deals with multiple retailers as well as handling the technical challenges of providing their catalogue in different digital formats.
“For publishers, the advantage of dealing with us is, all of that is managed through a simple interface and with just one contract to us,” he said.
EPub Direct earns revenue through a combination of a small monthly fee to publishers and a percentage of every book sold.
The company hopes to break even by early 2013 and may seek further investment at that point. Will Prendergast of NCB Ventures will represent the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund on ePub Direct’s board. “Will Prendergast is well connected in Silicon Valley and that would probably be the next logical step for us, were we to seek further funding,” Cuddy said.
