Planning a Bookstore

There are a number of issues you need to think through before moving ahead and launching your own bookstore.

In this document we use the general term "book" for the products being sold and delivered from AZARDI:Content Fulfilment (ACF); but the term book applies to periodicals, magazines, journals, textbooks, corporate docs and any other kind of document you need to publish to a controlled audience.

Book Inventory

Make an inventory of your books. You can do this on a spreadsheet that can then be imported directly into ACF. This will save you a lot of time when first setting up your bookstore.

Book Catalogue

ACF allows you to have two levels of organization for your books with a static site, and unlimited classification depth for an S4A site. In addition books may appear in multiple classification lists to make them easier to find.

AZARDI:Content Fulfilment, ACF, EPUB, sell books (optional)

You can apply your own keyword vocabulary to books. Well choosen and used keywords can significantly help discover content before purchasing.

Formats

You need to make a decision on which formats you will sell your books. You can of course sell all formats, but that is not always the right business path

One special format is Preview Online, and social promotion of your book with the ACF social widget.

You can use ACF for just Preview and direct users to other eRetail sites where you are selling the book, or any combination of business you want.

Subscriptions

Is there any benefit from selling your content for a controlled period. This is certainly of interest if you have learning or training content that is associated with a course of some sort.

Search

Does your content need or benefit from full text search. This is an additional feature which costs a little more, so you only want to use it if you think it brings real value to your content.

Special Products

ACF allows you to sell any combination of works and formats as a single product. That means you can create promotions such as buy book1 and get online access to book2 for six months. ACF will let you configure these sales and will control everything for you.

Catalogue Access

A feature of ACF is the ability to sell access to collections of books. This is designed for education and training publishers who may need to give access to a collection of book to a specific institution for a defined period.

Downloads

When you are selling downloadable content to the Desktop, mobile devices or as watermarked EPUBs you generally need to set a number of downloads. The number of downloads is probably linked to the price of your product.