iPublishCentral features Product Management, several built‐in options that help you offer discounts to select customers, create custom categories, and publish your book titles; Warehouse Management, a source repository that helps you manage your digital assets such as book cover art, assets & media files, and e-books; User Management, options to set up subscription-based institution or individual users, and a secure authentication for users to read a book online in the portal and offline.

It also includes Widgets, a professional tool to market and share information about your books and other assets to social networks and other websites; ViewInside, an easy-to-use tool that lets your readers get snippets of chapters of a book or a complete TOC; My Dashboard, a central page to know the summary of the assets, sites, and other statistics.

The new features added to iPublishCentral are:

1.   Discount Provisioning

Manage discount campaigns – set the offer period for a discount campaign, set the discount type as a fixed amount or percentage, or offer special incentives to select users. iPublishCentral provides a robust method to manage your discount campaigns. You can generate a unique discount access code, which the user can avail of while purchasing. It also allows you set the access validity to unlimited or for specific time period and set the redemption period to either limited or unlimited.

2.   Distribute Management

iPublishCentral allows you to upload and distribute a product or distribute a product from a centralized repository using the product’s metadata and ebook through various online retail channels. The Publisher has the option to choose one or more distributors and schedule the distribution of the product.

3.   Print Book eCommerce

iPublishCentral offers you an integrated portal to sell both eBooks and print books. A summary of print eBook feature is provided below:

• Product Listing
  iPublishCentral enables the publishers to select the products (print books and eBooks) for sale, quote the price, and even bundle them. In addition, different price list (for single package) is created while bundling the product.

• Order Product
  The portal displays the books catalog to the users (buyers). Users can select and add single or multiple products/product bundles to the cart. Prior billing, the items can be added or removed from the cart.

• Taxes and Shipping
  Publisher defines tax rates based on shipping address of the user. Multiple mode of shipment is introduced to the user and the shipment charge depends on the basic mode of shipment and the shipping address. Therefore, the tax and shipping charges are applicable only for print books and not for eBooks.

• Set Order Fulfillment Agency
  iPublishCentral adds a list of retailers (order Fulfillment Agencies), on the portal for shipment, provided by the publishers. In addition, the publisher can view and edit the retailer’s information. iPublishCentral enables publishers to set up the two order e‐mail templates, one for the retailer and another for the users. The auto generated order emails are sent to the user and the retailer, after placing the order by the user.

• View Reports
  This report provides statistical information about print book sale, available titles bundling and their sale, print titles/bundle sold, and revenue of print titles. Also, included in this report are summary of most popular print titles/bundles sold.

4.   iPad Book as an App

The iPublishCentral iPad Book as App enables publishers to make the selected titles available as an individual app on the iTunes store. The users can purchase these Apps from the iTunes store. The iPad Book as App allows users to access books on the device.

5.   iPad Bookshelf as an App

The iPublishCentral iPad Bookstore as an App enables the publishers to host a branded bookstore App on an iPad. These bookstore apps are listed on the iTunes store for the users. The user can purchase and download the bookstore. Existing users of the portal can also use this app to access subscription by copying in to the app with their account.

6.   Customization of email Template

iPublishCentral allows you to customize the auto responder email templates sent during an access code generation/redemption. The default email template is linked with each batch. In addition, you can preview and modify in-built templates to set auto responder when the user redeems the Access Code for a particular batch or individual code. Also, modify and save the customized template as default for further batches.

7.   iOffline Reader and Report

• iOffline Reader
  With the iOffline Reader, a desktop application, the users can view their books offline. With iPublishCentral’s subscription and authentication options, your customers can download book tiles to an offline reader — the iOffline Reader — that can be used to read a book offline on a laptop or PC.

• iOffline Report
  Various statistics on the iOffline reader can be generated on the iPublishCentral administration portal. Some of the statistics include the number of titles download requests, top downloaded titles, and downloads by a particular account type or geography.