It’s been a year since Montreal-based software company Valsoft acquired Above the Treeline (ATL), developer of the digital platform Edelweiss, from founders John Rubin and Annie Rubin. Following the acquisition, ATL began implementing price increases on publishers to use Edelweiss, and those rate hikes are having repercussions throughout the entire industry.

“Coming at what is already a challenging time for the industry,” remarked one sales director at a large New York City house who requested anonymity, “these changes in prices have made it difficult to carry out the vital task of ensuring independent bookstores can access the information they need on our full portfolio of titles. We are unfortunately having to be far more selective than we, or our indie reps, would like.”

Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius said that in addition to rates rising to $90 per title, “our annual fee also went from about $1,400 to $4,400. They said we had been undercharged because of the size of our frontlist.” As a result of the increases, Kensington is trying to “dramatically reduce the number of titles receiving DRCs [digital review copies] in Edelweiss,” Zacharius said. “In the past, we would load digital ARCs for most of our first-time releases. In 2025, we committed to a bundle of Edelweiss services that caps our number of titles getting DRCs to just 60. The price increase was dramatically out of proportion with any other cost increases we’ve seen from other vendors.”

The situation is even more unsettling for small presses, said Andrea Fleck-Nisbet, CEO of the Independent Book Publishers Association. “Independent publishers operate in an increasingly challenging economic environment, with rising costs and persistently high return rates,” she pointed out, adding that Edelweiss’s price increases “will inevitably place additional pressure on these publishers, without clear evidence that the higher costs will translate into improved access to trading partners or greater market reach.”

John Rubin justified the price increases by telling PW that over the last two years, the company “recognized that our long-standing publisher pricing model needed an update,” adding, “This year was about recalibrating in order to continue to innovate.” Even with the price increases, Rubin argued, "we still feel like that value that we’re providing is more than fair. The Edelweiss ecosystem now versus five years ago, 10 years ago is, again, 10 times more value for publishers—more usage, more activity—and the prices have not increased to that same level.”

Noting that there is now a baseline fee for publishers of $90 per ISBN for new listings and a fee for the initial upload of DRCs, Rubin said, “Part of this initiative is that there hasn't been standardization in the past. We have tried very hard to implement standardized pricing. We have different services that are priced in different ways. Some publishers just use digital review copies. Others use our full catalog services. Some use Edelweiss Designer. So yes, there are different ways that those different services are all charged. But the whole goal this year has been to standardize.” Moving forward, he said, “we anticipate only modest, cost-of-living-based adjustments to ensure predictability and stability for our partners.”

Jenn Northington, ATL director of marketing and communications, added that the new prices “are not about new services. This is about the value that they were already getting and making sure that we can sustainably give that value. If we can’t sustain the company, we can’t continue to deliver the value.” ATL laid off 15% of its employees in April.

But much like everyone else who has seen a huge price spike, Keith Riegert, cofounder and president of the Stable Group, is not buying Rubin’s explanation for the steep price increase. “In SaaS [Software as a Service], major price increases need to be paired with a transparent roadmap of improvements,” Riegert said. “Without that, it’s difficult to justify the cost. I haven’t seen anything that would warrant it in this case.”

Another independent publisher-distributor executive said, “I feel right now that it’s a lose-lose for independent publishers and independent bookstores. Our books were right there with Random House’s and the Big Five, and now they may not be.” They said they feared the “hard decisions we’re going to have to make—we only have so much of a budget,” and noted, “If we pay this fee, maybe we can't do this trade show, maybe we can't place an ad somewhere.”

Joe Biel, CEO and founder of Microcosm Publishing in Portland, Ore., questioned the rate increases, opaque pricing structure, and value of services provided for the cost. “Since the buyout, it's been our-way-or-the-highway,” Biel said of ATL's acquisition by Valsoft. “We find that when someone is not willing to negotiate, they’re behaving more like a monopoly than a trading partner. They had a sweet thing going, and they eroded the value of their brand and the value proposition of their platform.”

Commission sales rep Richard McNeace said that one of his clients “that is now on a flat annual fee” was initially charged “$20 per new title and $10 per backlist title, but then prices started to go up.” The huge increase in fees is resulting in “small presses and university presses delisting backlist and even frontlist titles, resulting in lost sales,” he said.

Edelweiss “has made it cost-prohibitive for publishers to adequately sell their books to booksellers,” McNeace added, “and on the bookselling side, there's a whole generation now of younger booksellers who only know Edelweiss. Even the older ones have gotten so used to it, they’re dependent upon it. If it’s not on Edelweiss, booksellers assume it doesn’t exist.”

Another commission sales rep noted that publishers and bookstore owners may be "trying to figure out how to exit," but "we are counseling people, do not drop Edelweiss." The rep was concerned about losing bookstore analytics, past orders and sales, comp title information, and other valuable notes if publishers leave Edelweiss or the information vanishes. “This is a potential real crisis,” they said. “All of our data, all of our unique notes, our IP we have given to them, they’re going to have it forever.” Reps have put all their information in one place for easy reference, and now “that makes people even more suspicious.”

Brad Johnson, the owner of East Bay Booksellers in Oakland, Calif., explained that EBB is “a backlist-heavy bookstore” and that if small presses cannot afford to list their titles on Edelweiss, “it is an increasingly irrelevant tool for me to use.” He noted that while booksellers may not yet be affected by Edelweiss’s price changes, “they eventually will: a publisher’s problem will become our problem.”

Rick Simonson, senior buyer at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle, wondered if changes at Edelweiss will drive innovation among smaller publishers. “Distribution and sales have been changed so that the big publishers and Ingram have piled lists onto their reps,” Simonson said. “No rep can talk through all the books on their lists; our rep for Simon & Schuster has 3,000 titles across categories.” For smaller publishers, that means booksellers “have to go looking” through Edelweiss, or through catalogs supplied by small presses, academic publishers, or distributors, in order to know that ARCs or preorders are available. The increased costs at Edelweiss could give distributors like Asterism and Itasca a way to help small presses with discoverability, he said.

A California bookseller echoed Simonson sentiments, noting that with the increase in costs of DRCs, publishers will be more selective about providing them, so that booksellers will have fewer options. “This will especially hit smaller booksellers who don’t get many physical ARCs; this is going to limit discoverability,” she said.

Room for negotiation

Several publishers PW spoke with said Edelweiss has been working with them to find ways to mitigate the price increase, but that it has not adopted that approach in all discussions. “It appears that different publishers are offered different deals, and some publishers are better than others at negotiating,” McNeace said.

Joshua Rothes, founder and co-owner of Seattle-based distributor Asterism, said he did reach out to Edelweiss to ask what it would cost if Asterism bundled frontlist titles from the 213 small presses it distributes. “It came to tens of thousands a year,” he said. “It's not tenable for that to become one of our biggest cost centers after rent and staff.” Rothes said these challenges are driving change at his company. “We are working on tools for our publishers, for folks be able to request ARCs, and we’re still doing regular quarterly catalogs and going to monthly next year,” he said. Rothes anticipates “a bigger conversation” about ATL among indie presses that serve indie bookstores. “Is there space for an alternative? That's something we're keeping an eye on.”

One marketing director at a small press said that Edelweiss is “significantly increasing the cost to create a new title listing for each book.” The press’s distributor is still negotiating the final cost, he said, “but we've been told to expect two or three times the previous rate, which implies that this fee isn't the same across distributors and/or publishers.”

Kirsten J. Allen, publisher of Torrey House Press in Utah, told PW that Torrey House purchased “a package for DRCs that gives us some ad spending. I thought the bundle included all Edelweiss charges, but learned in August that we have to pay $90 per title listing," plus listing fees that could be up to $60 per title. Allen noted that the press did consider listing fewer than its current 71 titles, but that if it does, it won’t be able to give each title “its best shot with booksellers and librarians.” The added expenses associated with Edelweiss, Allen said, makes “the difference between giving merit raises or not, or going to a trade show or not. We are feeling crunched by bigger fees and fewer options.”

A marketing director at a Midwestern university press said that it was “given the choice between $90 per digital review copy upload as we go or signing up for an annual ‘marketing package’ that allows us to upload a finite number of files for DRCs and includes some additional promos like banner ads or e-blasts. We begrudgingly went with the latter. We are still evaluating on a title-by-title basis which books to include. The price increases haven’t changed our needs or strategy. Unfortunately, ATL and Edelweiss effectively control how bookstores and publishers interact at this point, so it is a necessity for bringing books into the market.”

A commission rep who represents a number of scholarly publishers noted that university presses have strict budgets and thus “have no more money to give; they're having to choose which books they catalog and which they don’t. And books not listed on Edelweiss are functionally invisible to most retailers now.” One of this rep’s clients already canceled its contract with Edelweiss and pulled its listings from the platform. A marketing manager at another university press said after being charged double the previous price for the same number of titles, they ended up working out a deal where they only listed about 40% of its titles with Edelweiss. "It was the only way we could afford to keep Edelweiss," the marketing manager lamented.

“I imagine we’ll see a gamut of reactions as these draconian cost increases continue to hit every publisher,” their rep said, “from quitting Edelweiss to reducing their title count to looking for other tools to use.”

New competitors?

Indeed, a common refrain from publishers is that the answer to the price increase is for a competitor to enter the market. The Canadian platform BookManager has been mentioned as a potential alternative, and some publishers are hoping that Firebrand, owner of NetGalley, will step up.

Firebrand CEO Angela Bole said the company has already expanded its digital galley distribution to meet part of the need, and she didn’t rule out taking further steps. “There’s clearly demand for more choice and value across the full spectrum of services,” Bole said, “and we’ve been watching this space closely to evaluate where our technology might add meaningful value in the future.”

Microcosm is working on launching its own B2B portal, Biel said. Asterism, which has launched a pilot program of sending galley boxes to bookstores, hopes to integrate with Bookshop.org, finding alternative ways to promote small presses. “If we let the industry get so consolidated that there’s only one source for ARCs, one source online for consumers, that’s not good for small publishers,” Asterism’s Rothes said.

And then there is Ingram. Several people interviewed by PW said they have been told Ingram is working on developing their own alternative to Edelweiss. A spokesperson for Ingram declined to comment.

The entire episode has many industry members questioning ATL’s strategy. They note that the key to Edelweiss’s success has been its status as the most comprehensive platform for book listings, but if higher costs result in publishers dropping titles, Edelweiss will lose much of its value. As one commission rep noted, “They’re either going to overprice their business so egregiously that one new competitor will come along and underprice them just to eat their lunch, or a dozen tools will come along and everyone will bail.”

Clarifications have been made to this story for accuracy regarding fees for digital review copies.