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Books

In order to offer books to customers, you first need to create formats and upload them to Miguel. To create a book, simply enter the title and identifier (or product code). Books can be created via the administration or via the API.

Book identifier​

The identifier is used to match the book with the product on the e-shop or when communicating via API. It is advisable to use a uniform and comprehensible system. You can set it to any text, number or ISBN.

In our publishing house, we use the URL slug from the book title, so for the book The 4-Hour Body we use the-4-hour-body(all characters lowercase, no diacritics and hyphen instead of spaces).

  • diacritics are not recommended
  • we recommend using only the following characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, _, @, ., / and +.
  • we recommend using a simple, universal and readable format
  • we recommend staying within 50 characters, but the length is not limited

Uploading files​

You must first upload the books to be able to offer them. Files are uploaded to a secure central repository in Miguel. Miguel supports several formats for e-books and audiobooks (see Formats). It is also possible to upload several different formats for one book. For example, EPUB and PDF if you want to offer both simple and graphically complex versions.

The books are validated during the upload. For some formats, validation can take several minutes, depending on the size and complexity of the book and the current workload of Miguel. The EPUB takes the longest to upload (see Formats > EPUB > Validation).

Version Control​

You can specify a version number for each file, this allows you to have multiple versions of the same book in Miguel (the file with the highest version number is always used when generating the book). This feature was originally intended for storing all versions of a book over time, but we find that this option is not used and instead causes complications. Therefore, we will probably remove this feature in the future and when a new version is uploaded, the previous one will be deleted after some time.