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.
• The books you create are not for use on iPhone or iPod Touch

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 Web site, even if there's no charge for your books.
• You want to make your books available to users of PocketBible for iPhone.

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 the iPhone, you need to have the book hosted on our server.

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

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.

Once you're completely done with your book — it passes through BookBuilder with no errors, you've thoroughly proofread your book and examined the log file to make sure it's ready to go — 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. If it's larger than about 100K, compress it into a Zip file before sending it. If you want your book available for the iPhone, let us know so we can put a copy on our server when we're done processing it.

We will assign your book a unique Publisher ID and Book ID and modify your HTML files to include the new ID's. Then we'll build the book using our version of BookBuilder. We will email the LBK and/or PDB files back to you along with your updated HTML files. If you've requested iPhone access, we'll also upload the book to our server (see below for more information).

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. Make sure you check our Palm OS site even if you're only publishing for Pocket PC, and check the Pocket PC site if you're only publishing for Palm.

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...

You can't build Bibles for MyBible for Palm OS, but you can for PocketBible. Bibles are treated in a special way by PocketBible. If your Bible uses a versification scheme that doesn't match the KJV Bible — for example if it includes the Apocrypha, if books appear in a different order, or if the number of chapters in a book or verses in a chapter is different — then we may need to make changes to PocketBible to accommodate it. It's possible for us to do that, but it is time-consuming and we may or may not be willing to do it unless the Bible you are creating is something we're interesting in distributing at our site. You really should talk to us before converting Bibles for wide distribution that do not share the KJV versification scheme.

Summary

So here are the steps:

1. Completely finish your book. Make sure it's ready to ship to customers before submitting it to us.
2. Send an email to bookbuilder@laridian.com containing the following:
   • Subject: Customer ID followed by name of book.
   • Body: Tell us what reader(s) you're targetting. Especially be sure to mention iPhone.
   • Attachments: Your tagged HTML files, as zip files if they're larger than about 100K.
3. Wait a few days.
4. You'll get back an email containing your HTML source files with your unique Publisher ID and Book ID included and your LBK, LDR, and/or PDB files.
5. Use BookSetupBuilder or your own installation tool to create a setup program for your book.
6. Ship to your customers!

If you're publishing for iPhone...

Make sure you tell us in your email that you want your book available for iPhone. We will place your book on our server. You will tell us who you want to be able to download your book to their iPhone. To do this, log into your download account. You'll see a new button that allows you to control access rights to your files. You'll select a book (if you have more than one) and enter your customer's 7-digit Laridian Customer ID. Next time your customer logs into our server from the "Add Books" feature of PocketBible for iPhone, they'll see your book.

If you are publishing several books and selling/distributing them as one large collection, let us know and we'll create a product on our site that contains all your books. That way you only have to enable one product for each of your customers instead of granting them rights to every one of your books.