Title Submission Overview
This chapter gives an overview of the Safari Books Online title submission process. Whether you’re a publishing partner new to SBO or a longstanding partner, we will keep you informed of the latest updates to our title submission options here. In the constantly evolving technological landscape that is today’s reality, we strive to adapt and update our processes to accommodate your workflows and toolchains.
New publishers: Once you’ve got a signed Content Distribution Agreement, you are ready to begin submitting titles to Safari Books Online. There are several ways to submit titles:
- Distribution agency. If you already use a distribution agency such as Ingram CoreSource for your delivieries to Amazon or Apple, chances are you can use them for your Safari deliveries as well. We currently receive title deliveries from Ingram CoreSource and several other agencies; please check with content@safaribooksonline.com to verify if your agency is already delivering titles to Safari on behalf of other publishers. For CoreSource uploading instructions, see this chapter.
- Safari Content Manager (SCM). The SCM is Safari’s self-service web uploading tool that works best for uploading individual titles and for modifying titles that are already on Safari. For instructions on using the SCM, see this chapter.
- Upload via FTP. This submission process involves zipping a metadata.xml file with the primary title asset file and the cover image, and uploading to FTP. Using this submission process to deliver your titles to Safari involves some ramp-up work to set up the metadata creation workflow, and involves several steps to get your titles live (deliver to staging, review on staging, promote to live). The detailed instructions are covered in this chapter.
- COMING SOON: ONIX deliveries. Safari’s engineering team is working on adding support for ONIX + asset deliveries. We will keep you posted on this development; we anticipate it will be available in mid-2013.
Title Workflow
Here’s a description of what happens to titles once they are submitted.
- Regardless of submission method (1-4, above), each delivery first enters SBO’s ingestion and conversion processing queue. Occasionally titles fail to process through this first step successfully; if you suspect a title may have failed to process, you can check the status in the Safari Indexations Dashboard. See the Indexations Dashboard section in this chapter for more information. Processing can take just a few minutes up to several hours, depending on how many titles are in the pipeline at any given moment.
- Every few hours, Safari’s staging server (http://bowindex5.bvdep.com) is reindexed to reflect the latest batch of titles from the ingestion queue. This server is a mirror replica of our live server, but is only available to our publishing and uploading partners. It gives you an opportunity to familiarize yourself with the submission process before making your titles avaialble live. It also allows for experimentation with features you haven’t used before, such as the interactive features.
- Next, if you’re using SCM or FTP delivery methods, there’s a manual step to promote the title to the live site. If you’re using CoreSource (or ONIX, in the future), there will be no additional steps required. Again, the Indexations Dashboard will let you know if there are any hiccups along the way.
- The morning after our system has received the promotion request, the title appears in SBO’s new title acceptance QA queue. At this point each title is reviewed for basic errors and readability issues, as outlined in this chapter. If everything looks okay, the title is accepted and will be available on the live site the next day. You’ll receive an emailed update detailing the status of your current batch of submissions.
- You can modify a title at any time (either just the metadata, just the content, or both) via any of the above submission methods. Remember that if you modify the title, the modification appears first on our staging server, and you must also promote the modified title to the live site.
- Occasionally a title must be removed from SBO. Please see our policy on title removals.