Books and publishing

The link in chapter nine, ten years on.

Print copies can't be updated. Downloaded ebooks can't either. The companion link has to keep being right long after your site has been rebuilt twice.

The worked example

One title, one code, a decade of destinations.

Publishers' own advice is "use a dynamic code and check every link before each printing." That's a manual job we do every five minutes.

At the print deadlineThe companion pageDownloads, the errata page, the reading list. Whatever exists the week the book goes to press.

Launch monthA rule, for four weeksThe launch offer, the events page, the reviews. It ends on a date and the companion page is back underneath.

Three years laterThe site movesChange the destination once. Every copy on every shelf follows. Nothing was reprinted.

Any five minutesThe page goes downWe check every destination. A dead page fails over to a hold page you wrote, and switches back on its own when it answers.

OtherwiseThe fallbackWhere a scan lands if nothing above applies. It can't be blank, because the book can't be recalled.

What changes for you

Three things you stop doing.

Checking links before every printing

Every destination is probed every five minutes, for the life of the book. If one dies, you get one email and the code shows a hold page instead of a 404 until it's back.

Freezing your website for the backlist

Rebuild the site whenever you like. Each title's code is one destination to update, not a thousand copies to worry about.

Guessing which chapters get scanned

Scans are counted by code and by day, people only; link previews and crawlers are kept apart. A chapter code tells you which chapter readers reach for.

A thousand titles

One code per title. Your own domain on every one.

Print under a hostname you own, like go.yourpress.com/9780000000000. Readable slugs are a recovery feature: that address can be rebuilt on any web server in an afternoon, and if we ever go away you repoint one DNS record and every book keeps working. The whole catalogue also downloads as a file any web server can serve.

Bring a spreadsheet of ISBNs and destinations and import it; or reserve a block of codes for the season's list and assign destinations as each title's page exists. The record of what each code pointed to, and when, is kept for as long as the code is.