We’ve been exploring all things digital. With the intense focus on digitally publishing content to the iPad and creating iPhone apps, we wondered how other areas of publishing were doing and we wanted to know what they were doing. Well, Dee Steward of course had the  intel we sought. Dee reported that last week Barnes & Noble released Pubit!, a free direct-to-device self-publishing service for its Nook e-reader.

With PubIt!, turning your manuscript into a polished ebook is easy.  Simply upload the file you want published, and PubIt! will walk you through the steps (such as picking a cover) to get you to your final product.

Once you finish those steps, your ebook then becomes public and ready to be bought at BN.com; it will also be available to be read on iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch, Android, and so on.  If you have a fashion blog or website, then PubIt! is a great way to get your writing further exposed and offers readers more convenient (and mobile) ways of accessing your content.

With Pubit!, authors who own the electronic rights to their books can digitally publish their books, in some cases, in as little as 24 hours. So A few things of note:

• For authors who don’t have an Apple computer, you can use Smashwords to configure.
• Your book will be converted to EPub open ebook Standard.
• Your book will be lendable, which means that Nook users can share your book with each another.
• B&N pays royalties on your book’s retail price.  This is different from what ebook distributors pay, which is usually the net price (retail, minus whatever discount B&N demands).
• If you price your book between $2.99-$9.99, user will receive  a 65% royalty of the list price (> Apple, > Amazon which pays the sales price)
• You can publish direct to Kindle for free as well to DTP with a 70% royalty and your ebook will be available on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices.

Full Pubit! information: The publishing agreement here, pricing agreement is here, the content policy is here .

Dee offers some alternatives to PubIt! in her post, she writes:

In my opinion,  if I were seeking to ePublish my book, I would:

• publish direct to Kindle. they pay monthly.
• publish to Smashwords only for Epub but not Amazon or B & N distribution
• Publish through Pub-It because your book will be categorized by genre not just ebooks like Smashwords, which is hard for a reader to sift through
• make sure you opt out of Nook for Smashwords when you have successfully converted to EPubit
• join DigiBookWorld, so you can learn the vocabulary and how to format DTP properly, because Pubit is new Thus, you may have to do some reformatting. Which means you need to use a an WYSIWYG ebook editor like Sigil.

And if I just went over your head, do the last thing I said first.