[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Pierre Lawrence

I am using Draft2Digital to distribute my ebooks (a novella and short story so far) to retailers, [...]

Great. Personally, I'm a fan of "going wide".

You want the book in as many formats and as many stores as possible, especially with a growing minority avoiding Amazon.

(Personally, I refuse to buy ebooks from Amazon, because I hate the proprietary format. I only buy EPUB.)

Originally Posted by Pierre Lawrence

However, my impression is Google Play is an insignificant factor in the digital market place, i. e. for ebooks, and would not be worth jumping through the hoops required to list on its site.

Up to you.

I haven't seen updated statistics in a long time, but from what I last recall, the US ebook market was something like:

• 75% Amazon
• 25% split between the rest of the stores
  
  • Apple (~10%)
    
  • B&N (~7%)
    
  • Kobo (~5%)
    
  • Google Play (~1%)
    
  • [...]
    

With Amazon dropping slightly each year.

Although those stats were years ago... (nowadays, I'm betting Kobo + B&N have flipped.)

I know Hitch chimed in with a few posts over the years saying many of her self-published authors don't even get a single sale on Apple. (I assume Apple's sales are more Fixed-Layout textbooks + sales to K-12 schools and things like that.)

Probably heavily depends on your genre and types of books you're selling too.

Originally Posted by Quoth

If you want everyone to have it free, without limitation, forever, you can state on the "copyright" page that it's not any longer copyright but placed in the Public Domain. Then you can upload it to Gutenberg.org and the library here.

No. You cannot publish new works as Public Domain.

Copyright, since the Berne Convention, is automatic + "very sticky".

Closest you can get is releasing under a very permissive Creative Commons license, like CC BY 4.0.

(See my Side Note, about 3/4 of the way down, in 2021: "Problems with page breaks/blank pages/line spaces".)

Originally Posted by Hitch

Well, the Olden Days when Amazon would price-match free--those are pretty largely gone.

Thanks for that info.

Originally Posted by Luffy

So I cannot at the same time place the book at Kobo, Amazon etc and also on Gutenberg?

You can sell your books or put it up on whatever stores you want. (Although I'm not sure how taxes or anything works in Mauritius. There would probably be some sort of self-employment income/taxes you'd have to report.)

- - - - -

And Gutenberg only accepts Public Domain works.

See their "Public Domain Ebook Submission" page:

What types of eBooks may be submitted to Project Gutenberg?

Project Gutenberg only accepts works that are in the public domain in the United States. Generally, new submissions to Project Gutenberg are digitized versions of printed books, most of which were published at least 95 years ago [...]

[...]

Project Gutenberg does not accept copyrighted or other contemporary items, even if copyright or licensing permission would be granted (this includes the various “open” licenses).