Kobo Writing Life Kobo, KWL, Kobo Auto-Publishing platform, Kobo Inc. Abusive change of the terms of Use: Royalty Rate decreased from 45% to 20% Toronto Ontario

Kobo Writing Life Auto-Publishing Platform mofified its "Terms of use", Terms of Service in October 2013. The royalty rate of some categories of books (Classic books) was changed from 45% to 20%, and this change applies to the books that were already published under a 45% Royalty Rate. Publishers were not infomed by email of this dramatic royalty change and had no choice than to to accept by a "click through" update of their "Terms of use". If those new terms were not accepted then the publisher would not be able to publish new books. Kobo also threatens the publishers who do not accept the terms of use to have their published books removed from their platform.

This happens, of course, after a lot of publishers decided to publish their books (a process that is costly in time for each individual book) on this relatively new and small platform, compared to Apple iBooks or Amazon KDP.

Those publishers got their revenues cut by more than half on this platform, Kobo keeping a generous 80% of the sales...