Bloom Bulk Book Processing

caution

This material is for Bloom clients holding a Bloom Enterprise subscription.

Overview

Organizations holding a Bloom Enterprise subscription can organize their books into different bookshelves (book collections). For example, below is a sampling of the Bloom Library bookshelves for the organization Education for Life:

Bloom provides two different bulk operations to its Enterprise clients:

1. Bulk uploading an entire collection of books to Bloom Library, and
2. Making BloomPUBs for an entire collection for distribution to the Bloom Reader app.

Both bulk operations depend on grouping books into particular “bookshelves” similar to those shown above for Education for Life.

Essential Steps for Setup

There are two essential steps before initiating either of these bulk processing operations.

1. Set the Bloom Library Bookshelf for the book collection to set the bookshelf.
2. Ensure the publishing settings for each book are correct.

The first essential step is to select the Bloom Library Bookshelf. This is selected from a drop-down list in the Book Making tab of Bloom Editor Settings:

caution

Setting up bookshelves is something done in coordination with the Bloom Librarian.

Once the Bloom Library Bookshelf has been selected for the collection of books, the second essential step is to carefully set the publishing settings for each individual book in the collection.

To do this, in Publish to Web (or in Publish to BloomPUB) for each book, ensure the following are correct:

• Selection of Text Languages.
• Selection of Talking Book Languages.
• Selection of book Features.
• Cover Color.
• Visibility.
• Book Summary.

Bulk Uploading to Web

After completing the two essential steps, the entire collection can be bulk uploaded.

Choose any book, and go to Publish to Web.

There are three options for uploading:

1. Upload a single Book.
2. Upload an entire collection of books.
3. Upload a folder containing multiple collections.

The third option is rarely used and will not be discussed further in this article. To access bulk uploading of a single collection, click the arrow beside UPLOAD BOOK and choose Upload this Collection.

After making this selection, click the button to initiate the operation:

The bulk-uploader program will open in a separate window and begin its operation.

There are a number of very important things to keep in mind about the bulk-uploader program. This bulk-uploader program will :

• Upload all new books (i.e. any book that had not been previously uploaded to Bloom Library).
• Upload (and overwrite) any previously uploaded book that has changed.
• Skip uploading any previously uploaded book that has not changed.

Bloom Reader and Bloom Library Bookshelves

Bloom editor also provides a means to bulk publish BloomPUBs and prepare a special “.bloomshelf” file to accompany these BloomPUBs for bulk distribution on Bloom Reader. The same bookshelf is used for both Bloom Library and Bloom Reader.

Here again is a sampling of Education for Life’s viewed from the Bloom Reader app:

When a Bloom Reader app is loaded Bloom bookshelves, each bookshelf’s name will appear beside a bookshelf icon in a specific color (left-side image). Tapping on a specific bookshelf will open it, thus displaying its books (right-side image).

Bloom Reader Bookshelves provide an excellent way to organize many books on a single device. This, in turn, enables users to find the books they are interested in reading more quickly.

See also How to distribute Bloom books on SD Cards or Phones.

Make All BloomPUBs

To bulk publish all BloomPUBs in a single operation:

❶	Click on the Publish tab.
❷	Choose BloomPUB.
❸	Click Make All BloomPUBs from Collection.

A Make All BloomPUBs from Collection dialog will appear with a number of options:

❶	Tick this box to produce the special .bloomshelf file needed to group the BloomPUBs together into separate bookshelves on the Bloom Reader app.
❷	Click the color chooser to select a color for this bookshelf.
❸	If your organization wants to track particular Bloom Reader campaigns, choose a specific Distribution Tag to identify that campaign. See also this document.
❹	Tick this box if you need the books bundled together into a single .bloombundle file. See also BloomPUB Bundles.
❺	Click the MAKE button to start the process.

Bloom will make these BloomPUBs in a temporary folder called:

C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Local\Temp\BloomPubs

After the operation is complete, Bloom will open an instance of Windows File Explorer and show you the results which can be copied to a phone which has Bloom Reader installed.

If you are preparing multiple bookshelves for distribution on an SD card, or prepaid phones, you will need to copy the files over to a separate folder set aside to house all of the Bloom Reader bookshelves. Once all of the required materials are gathered, they can be copied to an SD for mass distribution.