Class sets and bulk sales

Provide ebooks to an educator, institution, conference or company

Class sets and bulk sales: Publishers can send a batch of ebooks to a school or institution with just a few clicks
Publishers can send a batch of ebooks to a school or institution with just a few clicks
  • Lets you create a batch of unique access links (vouchers), that you can sell to an instructor or organisation. Your customer then distributes the links to their audience (students, employees, customers…)
  • Absolutely no software development or integration required from your side.
  • Also good for: Selling a batch of ebooks to a business or conference organiser.
  • Key point: Really simple and fast.

If an instructor wants 30 copies of one of your titles, or a company wants to distribute one of your ebooks to its top 500 customers, here’s a way to handle such opportunities in just a couple of minutes.

The system is designed to let you do just this: create a batch of ebook access links and email them to your customer. Then bill them.

Class Sets & Bulk Sales is one of a growing suite of services from eBooks.com enabling you, the publisher, to capture opportunities and build out your marketing capabilities without spending a penny on development.

What happens once I’ve sent the access links to a customer?

Your customer will receive a CSV file from you containing a batch of hyperlinks; each one is unique. They then email one link to each recipient. When a recipient clicks the link, it will take them to eBooks.com, where they can start reading the ebook.

It’s that simple.

Pay for the whole batch, or only pay for vouchers that are redeemed

You can do this in one of two ways:

  1. Buy a batch of unique access links and we’ll charge you at the end of the month for all of them, or
  2. Issue as many access links as you like and we’ll only bill you at the end of each month for those that were actually redeemed. The per-voucher cost is a bit higher.
You can choose which way to go whenever you set up a new batch.

Too hard? We’ll bill your customer.

Some publishers just aren’t set up to bill random customers for one-off deals. No problem. Contact us and we’ll supply the access links directly to your customer and we’ll pay you in the normal course of business.

Tell us:
  1. the price you have agreed with the customer, and
  2. whether the customer will:
    • pay for an agreed number access links (pre-pay), or
    • pay only for those links that are actually redeemed by recipients (pay per use).
If you haven’t thought about that last point, you can leave it to us to negotiate.
This batch sale will appear in our monthly sales reports to you as a normal sale, and our normal discount will apply. If you agreed a special price with the customer, that will be shown as the prevailing retail price on that line of the report.

Can we create one access link that can be redeemed up to a designated number of times?

Yes, use the Campaigns tool in the publisher hub. You can create a universal link with a limit on the number of redemptions. You set the number. Once the limit is reached, anyone else who clicks on the link will get a message saying the campaign has ended. This makes it incredibly easy for your customer to distribute or publish the code.

A universal link also has an expiry date, set by you, after which it will stop working. More about Ebook Campaigns.

How is this different from eBooks.com’s other publisher services?

It’s not a white-label, publisher-branded service. You’re sending the recipients to eBooks.com for fulfilment. We look after everything, including user support.

Class Sets & Bulk Sales is a really simple, really fast system; you can quickly respond to a request, and get on with your day.

How do I get redemption reports?

You can access this info in real time by logging in to your hub account and clicking on…
> Class Sets & Bulk Sales > All Batches > “Details” at the very bottom.
From there you can see which vouchers have been redeemed so far, and generate a spreadsheet with that information.

Other services

Some of our other services do similar things, but they are fully-branded, enterprise level platforms. They keep the customer close to you, they include redemption stats, usage reports, etc:

Digital Comps
Enterprise-level platform to manage requests for inspection & review copies

Ebook Collections
Fully-branded platform lets you sell course textbooks and bespoke collections to libraries

Ebook Engine
Fulfilment service enabling you to sell ebooks direct from your website

How can I start?

If your company already does business with eBooks.com, that means we already have  your files and metadata, so the technical work is all done. You’re ready to roll.

Just contact us and you can get started straight away.


Last updated
17th February 2020

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