In the Octavo ecosystem it is possible to distribute paid content by individual purchase, but organizations can also acquire content in a bundle which can be accessed for limited period of time. This article explains how publishers can create licenses that will become available for other organizations to purchase.

License creation

Creation and management of licenses of an organization can be found under the tab Licenses in the Organization page.

A license consists of the following aspects: oBooks and pricing options. They are detailed in the next section.

License oBooks

The oBooks included in this list are the core of the license offering. These are the oBooks that users will get access to when their organization admin assigns them a seat.

It is possible to add any oBook of the same organization to a license, but only those that are published will be accessible by license users.

License pricing

The other half of the licenses is the pricing options. Pricing options map how long organizations can access licensed content and the cost per user. Given that organizations can purchase a license for an arbitrary number of users, content creators specify this price for each pricing option.

Each created pricing option consists of the following pieces:

• Name: human readable text to identify this option
• Running time: Defines for how long organizations that select this purchase option will have access to the oBooks of the license.
• Price per user: Cost of this option per user (seat). This is multiplied by the number of seats the purchasing organization select at the moment of the purchase. 

License users

License users are those users that were granted access to a purchased license in a given organization. Although this is not managed directly by the license creator, it is a good idea to familiarize with the concepts and wording from the perspective of the license purchaser.

Practical use case

Let's set up an example to show how licenses work in a real life scenario.

A publishing house (let's say Octa Editions) want to make a bundle available for other organizations, such as schools. They want to offer in the bundle two oBooks (I.e. Maths 1, and Geography 1) for which they expect schools to pay €15 if they only need access to the oBooks for 3 months, or €30 in case they need access for 9 months.

To be able to offer this, an administrator in Octa Editions create a license named, let's say School lite. First, they add the oBooks to this newly created license, and then the two pricing options mentioned before:

Pricing option 1
Name: Three months. Running time: 90 days. Price per user: €15.

Pricing option 2
Name: Nine months. Running time: 270 days. Price per user: €30.

And that's it! Other organizations will be able to acquire this license at the price they select. This is, if a school want to give access to the oBooks of our license to 5 users (regardless their total number of users) for three months, they will select the Pricing option 1, for which they'll be required to pay: €15 times 5 = €75. 

For organizations purchasing a license, the running time starts as soon as it is acquired. After the license expires, the assigned seat users will loose access to its oBooks.

Considerations

1. Changing the status of an oBook which is part of a license will affect users of that license. This is, only published oBooks are accessible even tho a draft can be linked to a license.
2. Adding or removing oBooks from a license will reflect on the license users access. This is, adding an oBook to a license will make the mentioned oBook directly available in the libraries of those users benefiting from the license.