We built the store we wanted to shop at.

What this is

A place where authors publish books — ebooks and audiobooks — and keep meaningful rights, meaningful pricing control, and a meaningful share of what readers pay. No exclusivity. No algorithmic discounting. No opaque subscription pools with disclosed-nowhere maths. Royalties paid to the cent and audited quarterly in public.

Why it exists

Nawras Alali built the main Penworth platform — an AI writing tool that lets anyone turn an expertise or a story into a finished manuscript — and quickly hit a wall: every major distribution channel for those books was extractive in some way we couldn’t fix from the outside.

Amazon KDP takes 65% on short works and binds books in Kindle Unlimited to exclusivity. Audible locks audiobooks for seven years at fixed royalties. The largest retailers withhold reader identity from the author who wrote the book. These aren’t bugs; they’re the business model.

We couldn’t negotiate those contracts. So we built a new place where the contract is different from day one.

How the store works

Authors set their own price between a floor and ceiling we publish openly. Royalties are calculated per sale and reported to the cent on a public transparency page. Authors are never required to be exclusive — the same book can sit on Penworth Store and on Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play the same day. The reading and listening experience carries no advertisements.

Readers buy, borrow, and own their reading in the formats Penworth produces — ebook, audiobook, and Cinematic Livebook. Reader identity is kept private from authors and from third parties. We do not sell reader data. We do not share it with authors. We do not use it for behavioural advertising.

Who’s behind it

Penworth AI — A.C.N. 675 668 710 PTY LTD — is an Australian company registered in South Australia, founded and run by Nawras Alali. The engineering team ships the whole stack: store, author tools, audiobook pipeline, royalty accounting.

What we want

For authors: a home, not a cage. A place where the price is yours, the rights are yours, and the next book is your decision, not a renegotiation.

For readers: books from voices the big stores don’t surface, at prices the authors actually set, delivered in a reading and listening experience that doesn’t sell ad space inside the book, and that keeps your identity private.

Talk to us

General: hello@penworth.ai. Authors: authors@penworth.ai. Support: store.penworth.ai/support.