Tunecore has been a boon for musicians like Trent Reznor, who pay the Brooklyn-based company a flat fee of $40 or so and then see their music available for sale on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic. The copyrights all remain in the artists' hands, as do the revenues; after paying the flat fee, 100 percent of the payout returns to the artists. (The digital stores take their cut first, of course.)

Today, Tunecore announced that it would extend this model to e-books through a service called Bibliocore. After an upfront payment, the e-book is delivered to Apple's iBookstore, rights remain with the author, and Bibliocore takes no cut of the royalties.

To participate, you need a few basic things. First, you need an ePub formatted book that has passed the 1.0.5 ePub check, contains no unmanifested files, and has its own ISBN number. Second, you need some cover art, at least 600 pixels "along the larger axis." Third, you fill out some metadata and set the price. Boom.

The service, now launching in beta, doesn't currently offer listed prices; interested authors must e-mail for a custom quote. Along with numerous other services like Smashwords, Bibliocore makes it simple to get books into the iBookstore. But once you're in, then what? Authors face the challenges of abundance that musicians have faced for the last decade. How do you get noticed? Who will help you market your work? How does one book a reading tour?

For those who already have an established audience, such services look like an incredible way to up one's royalty percentage on each sale—at the cost of being much more entrepreneurial about spreading the word, getting a cover designed, generating blurbs, getting an ISBN, buying all that brie for the launch party... But if you're ready to become youre own indie publisher, it's quickly becoming simple to do. Companies like Smashwords can even distribute to multiple stores, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and now the iBookstore, saving would-be authors even more work.

Publishers have been watching the music biz carefully, and have hopefully learned some lessons. They're about to face the same pressures: infringement gets easier, disintermediation means that publishers aren't the gatekeepers to quality work they once were, and digital storefronts can soon start dictating terms to you if they grow too powerful.

Print-on-demand has done its own disintermediation work for the last five years, but the sheer ease of the new devices and the digital storefronts, along with their recent popularity, look set to bring a whole new level of entrepreneurial activity to the book world—and that probably means more pain for traditional publishers.