facereading.bg: a textbook
that sells itself.
A site and online store for an author's textbook on psycho-physiognomy. Buyers pay by card and download a PDF marked with their own order number. Personal analyses are ordered and paid online too.
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The brief.
Grozdenka Alexandrova wrote a textbook on psycho-physiognomy: 322 pages, 8 chapters, her own illustrations and an ISBN. She lives in Germany and her readers are in Bulgaria. She wanted a site that presents the book and its author, sells the textbook as a PDF and takes orders for personal analyses, without her handling every payment by hand.
Constraints
- The file is the product: one shared PDF can replace a lot of sales, so every copy had to trace back to a specific order.
- Bulgarian e-commerce rules: terms, consent for digital content, cookies, and Н-18 sales documents for every card payment.
- Everything in her name: the domain, hosting, Stripe and licences sit in her own accounts, so she owns all of it.
Our approach.
We built the site on WordPress and WooCommerce with Auteur, a theme made for authors. The design follows the book itself: a warm paper background, EB Garamond, and the textbook's own illustrations in high resolution. The pages for the textbook, the reading sample, the author, services and contact went through several rounds of her notes until the text and pictures sat exactly as she wanted.
Protecting the file.
When a payment clears, the server makes a separate copy of the textbook for that order and puts the order number on every page. Copying, printing and editing are switched off, while the text layer stays so search and screen readers keep working. The download link waits for the copy to be ready instead of handing out the master, and it has a download limit. Every download is logged on the order with its time and IP address.
If a copy turns up somewhere, the number shows which order it came from. When a payment is refunded or an order is deleted, its copy is removed automatically.
What we built.
The textbook, sold as a PDF
Card payment through Stripe and a download right after payment, with no manual step for the author.
A personally stamped file
The order number on every page, locked permissions, limited downloads and a download log.
Analyses ordered online
Personal analyses are ordered and paid on the site, with the consents the law requires for services and digital content.
Sales documents
Every card payment issues a numbered document with a QR code under the Bulgarian Н-18 rules, and the monthly XML for the tax agency builds itself.
A complete legal layer
Terms, a privacy policy, consent at checkout, and a cookie bar that holds back tracking cookies until the visitor agrees.
Fast and findable
LiteSpeed caching and self-hosted fonts for 95+ on desktop in Lighthouse, plus titles, descriptions and product schema with the ISBN.
The stack.
- WordPress + WooCommerce with the Auteur theme and Elementor
- Stripe for card payments, in the client's own account
- Custom stamping plugin: Ghostscript on the server, a job queue and protected per-order copies
- Custom Н-18 plugin: numbered documents, QR codes and the monthly XML
- LiteSpeed + Wordfence for speed and security, Brevo for the site's email