My two favourite e-book stores to deal with as a publisher are, ironically, the two places where I sell the least books. While Kobo and DriveThruFiction are probably the small fish in my sales lines, they have the distinction of being the two distributors I regularly deal with give every indication they’re *actually interested in being a bookstore*.
Almost everywhere else I sell ebooks — Amazon, Google, and Apple — wants the ebook business as a part of a larger business strategy. Apple wants to make it easy to keep you within the walled Garden of their operating system; Google wants to absorb huge amounts of data and keep their search engine in peak shape (and, from the looks of their recent “let us create your audiobook” feature, a source of testing AI development); Amazon…well, the big river makes no bones about the fact that books where their easy-to-disrupt market where the products were loss-leaders that lured folks into more profitable areas of online shopping (and, these days, advertising revenue).
DriveThru grew out of the digital RPG market, where I started my publishing journey back in 2005, and while the publisher interface is clunky and not all that different from when I started, they have a toolkit for authors that I only *wish* other vendors would adopt. Kobo is attached to a larger ecommerce retailer, but seems content to keep their bookstore as a bookstore, rather than a lead-in for other types of sales.
I would be a happy author/publisher if more people used those sites (and happier still if I could coax more folks into buying their books directly from my websites), but just as big chain stores are often more convenient than specialty stores in the physical retail space, the ebook folks who want to be bookstores aren’t always as convenient as the big players.
So I sell books through the larger stores, often in greater quantities, and quietly make a point of mentioning the smaller players in the hopes that one or two extra people realise just how valuable they are in the publishing ecosystem.