Account:  a Creator's private BookRiff page, where content is uploaded, organized and priced; profile details are managed; financial information is stored; and where Creators can view statistics on the use of their content.

BookRiff™:  BookRiff.com is a place where users can come to build and print their own custom books. By compiling the works of various lengths that publishers, authors, artists, and other Creators have uploaded, then mixing that content with works of their own and authorized content from the web, users are able to draw from an enormous library of work to create their own custom reads.

Book:  On BookRiff, books are folders of all the content pieces a Creator has uploaded as part of one (usually published) work. These are marked with book icons, and when made public the content pieces in the Book folders can be added to Riffs™. In some cases, a whole book may be a content piece within a "Book" folder. In others, Creators may group content pieces together in "Book" folders that aren't part of the same published work, as a way of organizing content in their user accounts.

Creator Channel:  a Creator's public-facing BookRiff space, where only their own profile information, content, books, and Riffs are found. You can surf all Channels from the Creators page.

Creator:  anyone with interactive content on BookRiff—you become a Creator when you upload and offer your own content for sale or make a Riff public.

Content:  works or pieces of works that can be bundled together to form a Riff. These can be works uploaded to BookRiff.com Creator Channels, gathered from the web, or created by the Riff Composer.

Lightning Source:  the POD service provider used to print Riffs.

PDF:  Portable document format, a file format created by Adobe, useful for sharing and viewing documents across various hardware, software, and operating systems.

POD:  Print on demand, a speedy digital printing technology that allows for any number of books to be printed at a low fixed cost per book. POD differs from traditional publisher's printing methods in that books are printed only after purchase orders have been made by individual book buyers.

PayPal:  a financial service providing online purchasers with the ability to protect their credit card and bank account information from online merchants. Users set up accounts, then use the service to make online transactions across the world, regardless of location, currency, or language while keeping their account information confidential.

Riff™:  A Riff is our term for a user-generated playlist of various content available through BookRiff, including published books, blogs, maps, and more. Adaptable, printable, and share-able, a Riff is what you make it.

Other definitions (from Dictionary.com):

1. a melodic phrase, often constantly repeated, forming an accompaniment or part of an accompaniment for a soloist
2. to look through a book or other written material
3. a rapid, energetic, often improvised verbal outpouring

Riff Composer: a BookRiff user who assembles and prints bundles of content gathered from works made available on the site, found on the web, or self-created.

Search: to look for content to place in Riffs. Search options direct the Riff Composer to choose from a list of sources: the web, books, or other BookRiff content.

Share: the ability to invite others to view a Riff. Because most Riffs are print-only through BookRiff, others can only view a Riff from the BookRiff.com site where its only electronic copy lives.

Tag: a word or phrase used by the Creator of a piece of content to describe it, which is stored with the electronic document and used to optimize search results. BookRiff incorporates free tagging as well as a formal list of tag options corresponding with a list of browse categories for content.

UGC: user-generated content. This is content that is added on the fly or uploaded by Riff Composers, who are the authors of this work. The content may also be made public and sold by users in their Creator Channels.

Upload: to send files to BookRiff to be stored on our server. Uploaded files can be kept private, made public and priced, or taken down, and are never duplicated or shared without permission from the Creator.

Widget: a chunk of code that is embedded within an HTML page, usually borrowed from the code of another web page. BookRiff will allow Creators to place widgets on their websites to showcase their BookRiff content from their own sites. You'll hear about them when they're ready!

Web 2.0: since the term was first publicly coined by Tim O'Reilly at an O'Reilly Media web conference in 2004 to mean “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform it has undergone” (Wikipedia), it has endured relentless scrutiny and change. Like its definition, Web 2.0 is constructed, destructed, and constantly reformed by an infinite set of competing users. BookRiff is a website that fosters this healthy competition, and provides a moldable platform for users to create, share, and build upon each other's work.

XML: extensible markup language, a specification for creating .xml, .docx, and other file formats that use hierarchical coding systems to identify parts of text and data to foster the sharing of documents across various system platforms. The BookRiff server supports several XML-based file extensions, including .docx and .epub