Layla Cultural Platform
We are an electronic network of readers and authors. Our aim is to provide high quality reading material to the readers.
In order to do that, we bring readers and authors together. We provide a publishing platform for aspiring authors as we know it can be difficult to get your material published if you are a new, or young, author. We also provide free eBooks that are readable through our mobile phone Apps.
Anyone! Seriously. The platform is freely accessible to anyone with internet connection.
To browse, download and read books, you only need an internet connection and a mobile phone device. You can even write book reviews and rate books' contents anonymously.
Some services, though, need an account, e.g. submitting a book for publication or accessing your download queue. Registration is free and you can create an account from here.
Indeed. You only need an account to access services like submitting a book for publication or accessing your download queue.
You can browse our library from here. You can add books to your download queue and then download them to your mobile phone using our App. You don't need to download a book in order to view it's cover and meta-data (i.e. author, title, summary).
Our team works as hard as they can to keep updating the platform with new books and other literary material. Users can help us by submitting their own works for publication, which we will review and then add to the platform for users to read and download. If a user wishes to contribute other works that are not theirs (e.g. works of a dead author which is considered public domain material) they can do so by submitting this material to our admins through the contact form.
As often as we can. There is no preset timetable for when and what we add to the library. Sometimes we will add several books a day. Sometimes we will add a single book every few weeks. There is no fixed answer, but we promise we are doing our best to keep updating continuously.
Our content comes from different sources, and as such there is more than one license:
Electronic Publishing is also known as e-Publishing or digital publishing. The idea is to publish books (and other literary materials) in the form of digital data, instead of a printed ink on paper. Electronic Publishing has gained much momentum in the past few years as the industry is moving towards exchanging printed books with virtual media.
Because you can do it any time, any where! There is no physical book to carry around. You get the book you want on your mobile phone or laptop, and you are ready to read: in your house, in the office, in a coffee-shop, virtually everywhere. It is very easy to search through a book. Saving bookmarks and remembering where you stopped reading last time is automatically handled by the software. You can search for a specific author or a specific title very easily. Who doesn't want all of that?
If you are an author, we are sure one of your topmost concerns is: how do I reach the widest possible number of readers? You can go old school and publish on paper, which is fine. But how about reaching to all potential readers, all around the world, who are connected to the internet through our network? Does it look lucrative? Indeed it is. Pubishing electronically makes your book reach a wider population of potential readers. Most readers, especially young ones, nowadays are expecting to find literary material electornically. This is where we can help you.
There are many other online publishing houses. So why should you publish your book with us? If you are a veteran writer who has a wide base of readers and well-established market presence, you probably won't benefit much from joining us. But if you are a young, new or aspiring author, we know it is probably pretty difficult to get your material printed. And even if you got it done somehow, it is still very hard to sell yourself to the readers and let them read your awesome work. We can help you with that. We provide free books that are downloadable and searchable to a wide base of users. Our Apps have a news section which is updated regularly with news about our new additions. This way, all the users will get notified a few minutes after your book is added to the library. EVERYONE around the world who is using our network will get notified of your presence. How cool is that?
It is not hard at all! First, you need to register yourself as a free member. You don't need that to browse the library and read books, but you need it to publish a book with us. You can register here. It is very quick and easy.
After you finished registering as a regular member, you will need to register yourself with us as an author. Login to your account, then from the menu at the top of the page, select User Home, then click on Author hub. You will see a message telling you that you are not a registered author. Click on the link that says: register yourself as an author and fill in the required data. That's it! you are a registered author and you can start publishing books right away!
The above is a one time process, i.e. you will not need to repeat the above steps every time you publish a book with us.
The rest is easy. Log in to your account, go to your Author's hub, click the link that says Publish a new book, fill in the required data and upload your files, and you're done!
Usually it takes 5-7 days to complete the book review process and publish the book on our network. This is required as the book material will be transformed from the original you provided to the electronic format of our digital library. This process is done manually by an admin and it takes time.
We have a standard cover design for the books that have no cover. If you don't have a cover, we can provide a standard cover design for you. It won't stand out and your book cover will be similar to thousands of other books that have the standard cover design, so we usually advise against that. If you have someone who can design your cover for you, let them do it and upload your cover. We will soon provide a professional (paid) cover design service. But for now, if you are really in despair, you can opt to use the standard cover design for your book.
Only JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF formats are acceptable. To get the best outcome, upload a cover that is at least 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels high (600x800). If your cover is larger than that, this is fine, as we will reduce the size to fit our set guides. If your cover is smaller than that, try to get a larger image, otherwise your cover might appear pixelated (and perhaps ugly!) when we stretch the picture.
Your book should be in Microsoft Word's DOC or DOCX, or the Open Document Format (ODT). Other formats, especially non-modifiable (or modified with difficulty) formats, especially PDF, are not acceptable and will be rejected immediately.
At least one file: your book manuscript (DOC, DOCX or ODT only). Additional files may include:
The chatrooms are where readers and authors meet to discuss topics that include:
Chatrooms are open for public access. Any one with an account on Layla Cultural Platform can access the chatrooms and join any chatroom he/she likes. Users can also leave the chatroom at any time. You can join one chatroom at a time: if you want to join another chatroom, you will have to leave the currently joined chatroom first.
Chatrooms are open to any one. That means any body can post any message for everyone to see, and this incudes hateful or disrepectful messages. In order to track who is sending which messages, we require that anyone who wishes to join the chatrooms to register as a member on our platform. We don't ask for your real name or any sensitive or personal information apart from your email, and a username of your choice.
Any pasword that you feel is secure and you can remember it without writing it down somewhere so that others can find it. Specifically, DO NOT use the same password that you are using for your email account, or any other important accounts (e.g. online banking) for that matter.
As stated in #4 above, the password we request from you IS NOT your email password!. We ask for your email address to verify that you are a human being and to contact you, but the password we ask from you is solely for the purpose of logging in to our system. It has nothing to do with your email, facebook, twitter, bank or any other site's password.
Some books are provided in PDF format. Those are mainly external books that their authors have provided this way. We don't like this format and try to avoid it as much as possible, because PDF books are stiff and doesn't show well on small devices (e.g. mobile phone) that most of our users are using to read books on our platform.
Some books are provided in ePub format. We like this format as it is dynamic, i.e. the book's contents can be readjusted to fit the user's device screen resolution and orientation. Some books are provided by the authors as ePub books, while other ePubs are created by LCP for the books that their authors have provided in other formats (e.g. HTML online books), with permission of the authors of course.
Some books, especially old books (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle's novels) that contain text only, with no figures, tables or equations, are stored in an internal format that is fast to load and easy to read using our builtin App reader.