If you haven’t already heard, you shortly will that Indigo has flipped its digital book identity as of midnight December 14, now branding itself Kobo (an anagram of book) instead of Shortcovers.

In the very short year Indigo’s digital book service has been in operation, it’s been plagued with mismanagement, lack of vision and poor communication with its publishing partners, particularly indie publishers. Five Rivers signed up for Shortcovers within weeks of Shortcovers launch, and is still waiting for our titles to appear. There have been countless emails, sprints down blind alleys by way of text conversion programs, change of staff, and lost files. What was standard procedure last week may not be standard procedure the next. There is no communication, no mailing list to apprise publishing partners of changes, news, updates. Right from the start the whole thing seems to have been an ad hoc, make up the rules as you go sort of enterprise. Shortcovers has, however, been the topic of some interesting conversation on an email list to which I belong, CDN_POD@yahoogroups.com

Now Indigo has announced this change of name. For what purpose? Unless there’s major changes in operations intended for the new Kobo umbrella, I fully expect it will be the same non-communicative, bungling affair it started out as. A rose by any other name, in this case, will be as thorny.