About ZI² Books
We sell books for the presses that made them. That is the whole idea, and most of what follows is the arithmetic of it.
Right now there are 221 books here from 34 presses. Some of those presses are one person with a manuscript and a cover. Some are university houses that have been printing for a century. They are on the same shelf because they publish the kind of book we read ourselves: creation, Scripture, archaeology, the evidence and the arguments around it. We pick the shelf. The books argue for themselves.
Who is behind it
ZI² Books is built and run by Zenith Intelligence Technologies Inc., a company in Maryland, in the United States. We write the software, we host it, we answer the mail at support@zi2books.com, and we sell our own books through it under the imprint ZI² Press. Nobody licenses this store from somebody else and nobody else runs it for us.
The bookstore is one of eight products the company runs on the same foundation, at zi2.app: Calendar Suite for scheduling and booking, ZI² Sign for documents and signatures, ZI² Verify, ZI² Certified for server-level email attestation, and this store, with the ventures WalletUp, PaidSeal, CaseTrace and FLORALL alongside. They share one identity layer, one billing path and one audit trail, which is why a press signs in here the same way a clinic signs in to its calendar, and why a sale here lands in the same ledger discipline as a signed contract there.
Four rules decide how everything the company ships gets built, and this store is no exception. Each press is separated from every other at the database, not by a query someone remembered to write, so a bug cannot show one press another press's readers or money. Records are tamper-evident: the audit trail is hash-chained, and a changed row breaks the chain and says so. Anything that can block a customer arrives behind a switch that starts off and is turned on once it has been watched. And the numbers on the site come from production or from a test we ran; where something is an estimate, it says so.
That matters because of how it started. The first book here was Six Thousand Years, a ZI² Press title. We sealed it, priced it, sold it and paid ourselves for it on this site before any other press had an account. Every tool a press uses today, from the upload to the ledger to the refund button, was used on that one book first, by people who needed it to work. When something was awkward we felt it on our own sales. That is a different starting point from a marketplace built to take a cut of other people's work, and it still shows in the small decisions.
What is different here
Most places a press can sell a book take the money first and send the press what is left, weeks later. Retailers and distributors buy at a discount of forty to fifty-five percent off the cover price. The big ebook store pays a royalty on its own schedule, under its own rules about price and territory, and keeps the reader's name. Subscription services pay by the page read, so a book that someone finishes slowly earns less than one they skim. Of course a press can run its own shop on a generic storefront, and then it does all the work of being a bookstore alone, with no shelf next to anyone else.
Here the press sets the price and keeps it. A sale pays the press's own Stripe account the moment the card clears. Our share is ten percent of the sale price, taken at that moment, and that is the only money we make from a press: no listing fee, no monthly fee, no charge for storage or revisions. The card processing cost is ours, not the press's. A press without a Stripe account is paid out by us on a schedule instead. The reader buys from the press, on a page that carries the press's name, and the press can see who bought.
The press also keeps the rest of its business. We do not sell print or ebook editions. Every book page links to the press's own store and to the retailers it already uses, so a sale that belongs elsewhere goes elsewhere. The publisher agreement is the entire contract, and the publisher page has a calculator so a press can check the arithmetic against its own numbers before opening an imprint.
What you buy
A sealed edition is the book as a file with the press's seal on it. You buy it once. It opens in your browser from your license page, it opens in the ZI² Books apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac, and it keeps your place between them. There is no account to keep alive and no expiry date, because it is a file you hold, not a stream you are allowed to watch. If a press stopped publishing tomorrow your copy would still open.
The seal is what makes that safe. Anyone can take a sealed file to the verify page and check it against the press's seal, which is how a reader knows a copy is the press's own and not a stranger's. The format page describes what is inside the file, down to the bytes, so that a program written years from now can still read it.
Why a reader would choose this over the big store
Three reasons, and they are plain ones. The money goes to the people who made the book. The book is yours after you pay for it. And the shelf is chosen by someone, so a search for a subject here turns up the books that matter in that subject rather than whatever paid for placement that week. Reviews on a book page come from readers here and from the retailers' own ratings, each shown with where it came from.
Writing to us
A question about a book goes to its press, from the press page. A question about the site, a license, a refund or a right goes to support@zi2books.com, and the legal index lists every document that governs the service with its version and date.