What can I do on Bloom?

Bloom makes it easy for users with modest computer skills to create simple books in any script and any language, and has powerful features, too.

• Make books for new readers, using tools to help you write decodable and leveled text
• Create templates for other content creators to use
• Make bilingual and trilingual books with ease
• Add audio to books to create talking books
• Add alt text and audio descriptions to images for visually impaired readers
• Check your book for accessibility problems
• Embed video clips in pages to make sign language books
• Print small runs of booklets on a desktop printer
• Distribute books as PDFs, EPUBs or Bloom Reader Format for Android devices
• Share your Bloom books with others through the Bloom Library website

Case study: Growing your business with Bloom

Ernesto, a small Christian publisher in Latin America, decided to integrate Bloom into his publishing work after hearing about the platform.

He looked at the Bloom books in Spanish, filtered the library by the licenses, and found 380 books with permissive Creative Commons attribution licenses that he could sell.

He downloaded the free software for the editor for Windows. In about a day of practice, he felt generally comfortable using the software.

He thought about how could he use Bloom to grow his business. He went back to the library to see the possibilities, and found a collection of 50 open Bible stories that covered Genesis to Revelation. He downloaded them, printed them in Spanish, and promoted them in Sunday school classes and churches. (He got a good response!) He also realized that he could combine a number of stories into a single book, like the stories about Exodus, which was particularly popular.

He also noticed collections of books from the Guatemalan Ministry of Education. He went through the books and found 20 that he thought might sell well. He sold a modest number of copies at an affordable price.

He noticed some books had been developed as leveled books (progressively more challenging for new readers) using Bloom’s leveled reader tool. He found a set of 25 books in five different levels that he could sell to schools and families to help kids learn to read. Ten schools bought the books for extra reading practice.

Ernesto liked the fact that he had no software costs, but he was also intrigued by Bloom Enterprise, as it would enable him to put his own publishing house name and logo on all his books to help build his business.

With his subscription, he also got a bookshelf in the library where his own books would show up, and he could have a description about his publishing house. When people read his books in digital form, he could see what books were popular and where people were reading.

He offered some of his branded books for free so people could get to know his publishing house. By adjusting the settings, people were able to read his books online (but not download them), and he could let readers know how to buy a printed copy.

Bloom had a built-in tool that could do the narration and recording, and he decided to experiment with these. He had friends who agreed to read the books, and he imported their narration into Bloom. And then people loved listening to these books!

He made comic-style books with full-page images and speech bubbles that enabled him to make very attractive books, similar to those from big publishers—not just for simple storybooks, but long-form content, too. He posted samples online that would point people to his website and other places where they could buy copies of his books.

Ernesto learned how to add other languages to digital books, and exported the files to print them in the other languages—he even offered them online in a multilingual format. Subscribing to Bloom Enterprise increased his costs, but also gave him new options and new visibility.

Bloom continued to be a very productive strategy for some of his publishing needs.

Copyright and Creative Commons

All books in Bloom are copyrighted. There is an owner, but we encourage the use of Creative Commons licenses. You may see it’s licensed as a CC Creative Commons BY, which is attribution.

 With that license, the author is letting anyone know that they can utilize the book in any way that they want to, including for commercial purposes. It’s always important when looking at books to check to see what the license is. The license will always be shown on a book’s page.

If the person has licensed it in a way that does not prohibit certain uses, then you have freedom without having to contact them, because they’ve already announced what rights they give to other people. There will be some books with restricted licenses that might not allow you to translate it, or create new versions, but there are hundreds and indeed thousands of books that have permissive licenses which, though copyrighted, allow you to make your own copy.

Monetization

By using the tools available, you can limit readers to being able to read online, but not be able to download a PDF and print out your books. The idea is to leverage the tools so that you can make people aware that your book exists and where they can buy it, without necessarily having to share it for anyone to read or download.

You still have to have your business. but then Bloom can be a place where people can learn about your books. As a publisher, you can find titles on Bloom that are open access with creative common licenses that allow for commercial distribution.

 You distribute those locally and sell them.

You can have your own collection on Bloom, where you post a few books people can read, which link to your publisher website where they can find books that they can buy. You can post an excerpt, then provide information about how readers can get the entire copy.

Creation and styling

The design is very carefully constructed to make it extremely easy for people that have low levels of technology expertise to be able to use it. We haven’t tried to follow modern interface conventions because we’re looking for ease.

Bloom provides you with the ability to create fresh books. The basic book template is basically a blank book. It has a credits page already laid out for you where you can you can set yourself as the copyright holder, and you can choose the license. You can also add your own images and create custom books that have just the things that you particularly want to share.

If I download a book that somebody else has shared and given me permission through the licenses, then I can simply edit the text.

There are text formatting tools to be able to do your standard bold, italic, underline, superscript, so forth, but the more powerful tool is that Bloom works by styles. You could create styles of your own. Once you change the style, then every page that uses the normal style will reflect those changes.

You can rearrange your content into an alternate layout. It also has some tools for being able to cut up the page in different ways. You can drag the dividers around so that you can increase the size of one thing or another. When you have filled up a page, it doesn’t automatically create a new page and flow the text to it. You build it a page at a time. You could create the pages, and you could copy and paste text, insert images, and use this to get your PDF, EPUB or BloomPUB.

Publishing options

You can create PDFs, upload it to the library, create a digital book for our Bloom Reader app or an EPUB, or with a subscription produce an audio or video version of your book. There’s a PDF creator inside the program, an excellent way to get a preview.

Bloom will also do the cover separately, so it will take just the front and rear covers and create something you can print out double-sided. You could also create a PDF that is ready for double-sided printing. Bloom is organized and in-positioning the pages so that you have something that could be printed out double-sided.

Booklet printing just makes it a single click. There’s various digital formats. Bloom allows you to create a preview of what the book would look like in this format so that you can see for yourself how it’s going to render on a screen. If you want to have a digital version, it’s going to have to have a different font size, for example, I can immediately go back to edit the book and adjust it for a different format. Bloom then adjusts the layout so that it’s in a 16 by 9 digital version.