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This program builds a book cover from a Lightning Source Inc. template. Eventually, the program will be abstracted to build covers for any printer, as long as appropriate bleed, live, and spine coordinates can be determined.

For those who do not know, LSI, a division of Ingram Content Group, is the single largest print on demand printer and distributor, prints tens of millions of books every year, and has thousands and thousands of customers everywhere of every size. So this script, which builds an LSI-compliant cover programatically from an LSI-provided template, could be quite useful to many people someday.

People who want to design without the templates certainly have that option, or they can engage the services of a thousand excellent book cover designers.

The program cues off the templates because 1) that is what Lightning Source's formal written instructions tell users to do 2) the templates have LSI bar codes used for LSI's internal tracking purposes.

It's recognized that this is fragile because LSI might change their templates, but, if they change their templates, that probably means that they are also (slightly) changing the underlying spine, etc. calculations, so either way the program logic would have to be adapted.

[Specifications for LSI Cover Submissions]