Learn how to integrate your cloud ebooks and libraries with Memberful.

What is Memberful?

Memberful is a service that helps you sell memberships to your customers without the need for coding skills or building your own solution. With Memberful you can create a subscription plan, give it a recurring or one-time price, and share its link so users can subscribe and make the payment easily. All the difficult tasks are done by Memberful, starting from handling payments and reminding recurring users, and ending with managing users and orders. In addition, Memberful dashboard gives you helpful analytics and insights.

Memberful also has a great Wordpress plugin. This plugin allows you to restrict access to your content to only subscribers of specific plans. Memberful handles synchronizing users and sessions between your website and Memberful server. It also provides a payment form integrated with your website, so visitors do not have to leave your site in order to make the payment.

Check out the complete list of Memberful features.

The Kotobee Plugin

The Kotobee plugin allows you to integrate your cloud ebooks and libraries to sell through various stores or payment gateways, such as Memberful, all under your Wordpress site. Integrating Memberful with Kotobee opens the possibility of automatically collecting subscription fees from your users, in order to access your ebook content. Users who stop paying their subscription fees will automatically lose access to your content.


Note, you will need a Memberful paid plan in order to use the Kotobee Plugin with your account.


The idea is simple:

  1. Create a Memberful account and create subscription plans representing different ebooks (or collections of ebooks).
  2. Using the Kotobee plugin, link each subscription plan to the appropriate Kotobee cloud ebook (or in the case of Kotobee Library, you may link to an ebook, category, user role or to the entire library).
  3. Whenever customers subscribe to a plan, they will automatically receive permission to access Kotobee. Optionally, they may automatically receive an activation email containing details on resetting their Kotobee password.

Installation and Setup

Create a Memberful Account

1. Create an account on Memberful.com through the signup page. Fill in your information and click "Create my account".


2. Choose "I'm using Wordpress".



3. Follow the displayed instructions to install and activate the Memberful Wordpress plugin.

Install and Activate the Memberful Plugin for Wordpress 

If you already have an account on Memberful and haven't yet installed the Wordpress plugin, follow the steps in this video from their website.

Note that, at the time of writing this article, if you're using Wordpress 5.0.x or later, then you have to install and activate the Classic Editor since Memberful WP plugin isn't compatible with Gutenberg.

Install and Configure the Kotobee Plugin for Wordpress

  1. Download the plugin file from https://wordpress.org/plugins/kotobee/

  2. In your website, navigate to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin and click Choose File.



  3. Navigate to the zip file of the plugin and click Install Now.

  4. After installation is complete, a new menu will show up in your dashboard labeled Kotobee. Click on it to set up the integration.

  5. Enter your serial and tick the checkbox next to Memberful logo.

  6. After you save the changes, a new section appears on this page. Find the webhook endpoint and copy it to use in the next step.

Setup Integration settings in Memberful dashboard

  1. Sign in to your Memberful dashboard using yourdomain.memberful.com/admin/auth/sign_in replacing 'yourdomain' with the domain you chose in the registration process, then click on Settings from the top menu and navigate to Integration page.

  2. Navigate to Webhooks tab and click Add a new webhook.
    In the Name field, enter any name you want for this webhook. In the Endpoint URL field, paste the webhook endpoint you copied in step 6 from the previous section. It's basically your website URL ending with: ?kotobee_memberful_endpoint=webhook


  3. To test whether you've correctly set the webhook, go back to the webhooks tab and click the Send test webhooks button.



    Choose the endpoint you added in step 2 and select order.purchased webhook, then click Send test webhook.

    Now in your Wordpress dashboard, navigate to Kotobee -> Memberful. A green label saying "Connected" should appear at the top of the page meaning the webhook is working.


Create a Memberful plan

By default, there's a sample plan added for you in your Memberful account for testing purposes. If you want to create new plans, please read this article.

Link Memberful plans with Kotobee resources

Say you want to link Sample Plan with a cloud ebook in your account titled My Book so that when a member subscribes to Sample Plan gets access to this book. 

  1. In your Wordpress dashboard, navigate to Kotobee -> Memberful. 

  2. Under Plans tab you'll see a drop down with all of your current plans in Memberful. Choose Sample Plan.

  3. Two tabs will appear below: Libraries and Cloud Ebooks. In our case, we want to link the plan with a cloud ebook, so click on Cloud Ebooks tab.


  4. You'll see a table of all cloud ebooks in your Kotobee account. Click the blue Link button next to My Book. The button should turn into white meaning the link is added successfully. Otherwise, a message will pop up telling you if anything goes wrong.

Test the Integration

Now you may want to simulate a user subscription in order to test your configuration. Memberful provides testing cards to use when it comes to payment so you don't have to pay anything while testing.


First of all, you'll add a subscription button to a post in your website where users can subscribe to your plan.

  1. In the Dashboard, navigate to Post -> Add new.

  2. Click the Memberful drop down in the editor toolbar and select Buy Plan.

  3. Choose a plan and add any text for the link, then click OK.

  4. Publish the post.

Now preview the post and click on the link you added. A form will pop up asking for your email and payment information. Add any email and use the testing cards for payment, then click Place your order.


Finally, if everything is configured correctly, you'll find the new user added to Kotobee with the permissions you've set before.