Nook Media, the Barnes & Noble subsidiary that includes the Nook line of ereaders and tablets, has launched a new self-publishing platform for ebooks. Called "Nook Press," the new platform takes the place of PubIt, another digital publishing program Barnes & Noble launched two years ago, and uses new technology from FastPencil, a digital self-publishing company that Barnes & Noble partnered with last year.

Nook Press allows aspiring authors to write and edit their manuscripts on its website and sell the completed ebooks at any price between $0.99 and $199.99. Published ebooks appear for sale in the Nook Book Store in the US and UK, through the Nook mobile apps, and on Barnes & Noble's main website. Barnes & Noble takes a 35 percent cut of the list price of books between $2.99 and $9.99, and a 60 percent cut of all other book prices. That's on par with the 30 percent cut and 65 percent cut Amazon takes from authors under Kindle Direct Publishing's options, and the 30 percent cut Apple takes from iBooks Author publications.

So far, Nook Press is only available to US authors who have applied for and received a stamp of approval from Barnes & Noble, and is restricted to the desktop website, but we've reached out to Barnes & Noble about more availability information and will update when we hear back. It's unclear how the move will impact Nook's flagging device sales as of late, but at the very least, it is on track with what we previously heard about the company's plans to expand Nook Media's self-publishing options.

Update: A Barnes & Noble spokesperson told The Verge that while Nook Press isn't optimized for mobile, it contains no Flash elements and should work on mobile devices. As far as expanding access to UK publishers, Barnes & Noble's spokesperson said it's "certainly a market we're taking a look at," but had nothing to announce at this time. We also learned that Nook Press supports uploads of .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, and ePub file extensions, but coverts all files to the ePub standard. There is no direct integration with Microsoft Word yet, but Barnes & Noble's spokesperson said that's "certainly a great idea."