Kotobee v1.5.9 features a new Shopify plugin as well as new collaboration and UX features to make Kotobee a top-ranked team-based digital publishing platform. Note you may see the Release Notes for any of the older releases of Kotobee anytime.

Here are the major additions in v1.5.9.

Shopify Plugin

We're happy to announce our latest plugin to provide integration with your Shopify store. Using this plugin, you may link your Shopify products with cloud ebooks or library ebooks in your Kotobee account. Upon successful purchases to your product, your users will receive immediate secure access to the linked cloud ebook(s) or library ebook(s).

For more information on this plugin, please check the article Integrate with Shopify.

Team Collaboration with More Permissions

You may now share authoring access to your hosted ebooks and cloud ebooks with other members of your team to allow co-authoring and collaboration. Different permissions exist to limit the scope of each team member. The following shows the different permissions for hosted ebook sharing.

Cloud ebook sharing allows other permissions, such as managing users, and managing settings.

The Share button is now placed in useful places, such as when editing the content of an ebook. In this case the sharing scope is limited to the currently opened ebook.

More information may be found here:

Share Your Hosted Ebook For Collaboration

Share Your Cloud Ebook For Collaboration

Chapter-Specific Access

Our users have been a big fan of our flexible permission-based system for cloud ebooks and libraries. We've decided to take it a step further in this flexibility and provide chapter-specific access. This means that you can choose to unlock only certain chapters for a user. This works great for selling access to chapters of a book. Our API and Wordpress plugin have been updated with this feature as well.

New Export Customization Option

The option for users to combine and export all notes, bookmarks and highlights as a PDF file, has now been made optional for you.

Android API Level Increased to Level 28

If you have been submitting Android apps to the Google Play Store recently, you know the relevance of this. Google Play now requires that all apps submitted be compiled using API Level 28 or above. Since we have previously been using API Level 27 for a year or so, we've upgraded to API Level 28.

Widget Builders

Special widgets added to your ebook may now be edited directly from inside Kotobee Author (using a Widget Builder), without having to go to a different software or website, then re-importing the widget. This is part of our Kotobee Services effort, to provide a seamless experience with custom created widgets. In order to inquire further on the possibility of creating widget builders for your current widgets, please contact our services team.

Create Cloud Ebooks Without Exporting

Previously the only way to create a new cloud ebook would be to export an ebook app and choose to convert it to a cloud ebook. Now you have a more logical way, which is to create a cloud ebook without exporting an ebook app. From the Cloud Ebook page, simply click on the new + button. You will be prompted to enter the book name, and choose the cloud ebook to be encrypted or not.

Better Apple Books Support

Exporting EPUB format now comes with a new Advanced options button. One of the options is for forcing embedded fonts when opening in Apple Books (previously Apple iBooks). Originally, when opening EPUB files in Apple Books, the user can change the font to his preference. This new option would instead force your embedded fonts.

Guidance During Export

We all need that extra help. At different places throughout your ebook creation journey we are providing tips for what your next step should be, along with relevant link.

Reader Improvements

A few ergonomic improvements have been made to our reader, for extra convenience to your users. Keyboard shortcuts such as Ctrl-C (Cmd-C on Mac), and Shift+Arrow keys been applied. Popups previously did not work in EPUB readers when the message contained Unicode characters. This has now been sorted and working well.

Auto-Detect Your Latest Supported Version

Not much of a functionality feature, but for convenience you may see up to which version your Kotobee license supports. Kotobee Author licenses are given a default one year of free updates. This means you may download any later version which was released within one year from the moment of purchase. The Updates Available dialog box will inform you the latest supported version for your license and whether you're eligible to download this new update.

You may download this version (or revert to older versions) from https://www.kotobee.com/products/author/versions.