Case study 01
Publishing → distribution → commerce → payment → reading in one production system
Overview
Sard Books is a digital publishing and distribution platform designed for publishers and readers in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC market.
The platform connects publishing houses with readers through digital book publishing, sales, payments, and mobile reading.
I was responsible for the database, backend, deployment infrastructure and pipelines, while also contributing to the Angular and Flutter applications.
Business challenge
The platform needed to bring several traditionally separate parts of digital publishing into one system:
The most technically sensitive part was protecting purchased EPUB/PDF content while still allowing legitimate users to read their purchases on mobile devices.
Impact
Publishers needed a controlled path from catalog to settlement — not disconnected tools.
Regional market requirements (RTL, SAR, local payments) had to be first-class, not bolted on.
Digital assets are commercially valuable; public URLs would create an obvious distribution risk.
Engineering
Technical constraints that shaped the architecture and delivery approach.
01
The platform had an admin dashboard, publisher dashboard, and Flutter reader application. All three required different permissions, data shapes and workflows while sharing the same underlying business rules.
02
Publishers were uploading commercially valuable EPUB/PDF files. Simply exposing the original files through publicly accessible URLs would create an obvious distribution risk.
03
Payments were asynchronous and could involve payment confirmation, order fulfillment, publisher share, platform commission, promotional discounts, tax/VAT, and publisher balance updates. Duplicate or incorrectly processed payment callbacks could therefore create financial inconsistencies.
04
Publishers and books required controlled workflows before becoming available through the platform.
Ownership
I was the primary owner of:
I also contributed approximately 20% to Angular and Flutter development and worked directly with the client alongside another team member.
Solution
A unified .NET backend enforced shared business rules across admin, publisher, and reader surfaces — with protected asset delivery and idempotent payment settlement.
The content-delivery architecture was designed around controlled access to digital assets. Publisher uploads were processed by the backend before storage. The protected asset was stored in private cloud storage rather than being exposed as a normal public book download.
I implemented the backend integration with MyFatoorah and the payment/order processing flow. The system had to account for asynchronous payment callbacks and prevent the same successful payment from being processed more than once.
The important architectural principle was: a payment callback should be safe to retry without creating a second order settlement.
Architecture
Admin and publisher dashboards and the Flutter reader share one .NET API, with MS SQL, Redis, and protected assets on AWS S3 / CloudFront.
Results
The platform reached production and was used by real publishers, readers and transactions.
The system provided a unified foundation for Publishing → Distribution → Commerce → Payment → Reading while supporting the regional requirements of the target market.
Technology
Listed last on purpose — technology supported the business outcome; it was not the story.
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Next step
Talk to Solastia Systems about the business outcome you need — architecture, delivery, and measurable results follow from that.