Publishing Your Laridian^® Books

This page contains information about submitting your finished books to Laridian for the assignment of a unique Publisher ID and Book ID.

This information does not apply to you if:

• You're creating books for your own personal use.
• You're creating books for the use of others, but distribution is limited, say to members of your church or Bible study group.

For this kind of limited distribution you can simply use the books as they're produced by BookBuilder. Simply assign a different Book ID to each of the books you create and there should be little chance that your books will interfere with others. If they do you can simply change the Book ID.

This information does apply to you if:

• You're creating books for sale, either online or in a physical product.
• You're creating books for wide distribution, perhaps through a website, even if there's no charge for your books.

If you're in one of these categories, it's important that your book is assigned a unique Publisher ID and Book ID so that it won't interfere with books created by others which might be installed on your users' devices. In addition, if you want your books available on iOS devices or other platforms from which PocketBible^® directly downloads books from our server, you need to have the book hosted on our server, which we'll do for you at no charge if you follow the instructions that follow.

It's also important in this case that you're not creating content that directly competes with Laridian, as is described in your End User License Agreement. By submitting your book to us for final processing, it gives us the opportunity to verify that you're in compliance with the agreement.

The Process

If you fall into one of the categories above that requires you to submit your books to us, follow these instructions for submission. Note that the services described below are only available to owners of BookBuilder Professional. If you have the Standard version of BookBuilder or one of the older platform-specific versions, you need to upgrade to BookBuilder Professional before continuing. Contact us for pricing.

1. Tag your book according to the instructions that come with BookBuilder Pro.
2. Verify that your book can be built with BookBuilder resulting in no errors.
3. Test your book on at least one of our platforms to make sure it's working as you expect. Thoroughly proofread the final book to avoid small errors that would result in the book having to be re-submitted.
4. Send an email to bookbuilder@laridian.com.
   • The subject of your message should be your Laridian customer ID followed by the title of the book you want to publish.
   • Attach the tagged HTML file to the email, along with any images that are required in order to build the book. You do not have to send us the LBK file, just the tagged source file. If it's larger than about 100K, compress it into a zip file before sending it.
   • In the body of the email, tell us if you want your book to be made available for iOS and future platforms that might require books to be hosted on our server.
5. We will assign your book a unique Publisher ID and Book ID and modify your HTML files to include the new ID's.
6. We will build the book using the in-house version of BookBuilder.
7. We will email the LBK file back to you along with your updated HTML files.
8. If you've requested that we put the book on our server, we'll do that before sending it back to you. (See below for more information about distributing your books from our server.)

If your book doesn't meet the "no direct competition" clause, we'll let you know. You can verify this for yourself by examining the list of books we offer for sale at our website.

What We Won't Do

• We won't fix errors in your book. You should be able to build with no errors before you send us your book.
• We won't perform this service at all unless you own the Professional Edition of BookBuilder.
• We won't take more than a few days to get your files back to you. (Generally no more than a week, often less.)
• We won't process the same book more than once in a calendar month. Again, get the bugs out before you send it to us.

If Your Book is a Bible...

Bibles are treated in a special way by PocketBible. Historically, we have had to modify the PocketBible code each time we released a new Bible. We've recently made changes to the LBK format to avoid this issue, but we have not implemented these changes in PocketBible for all our platforms. It's likely you will see an error message saying that your Bible is not recognized if you run on a platform that has not been updated.

How to Enable Others to Download Your Book From Our Server

When you submit your book to us, make sure to tell us you want it placed on our server. After we have processed your book:

• Log into your download account at our website.
• Select “My BookBuilder Books” from the menu at the top of the page.
• Enter the intended recipient's Laridian Customer ID.
• Select a book from your list of books (if you have more than one).
• Select “Authorize”.
• The next time the recipient logs into our server using the “Add/Remove Books” feature of PocketBible on their device, they'll see your book as one of their available downloads.

If you are selling books through an e-commerce function on your own website and want to automate the process of authorizing your customers to download your book from our server, contact us so we can provide instructions. This is a non-trivial task for most users but if you know how to write scripts that run on your site and can collect the customer's Laridian Customer ID during checkout, it is possible to fairly easily communicate with our server to enable them to download your book.