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The proof bundle

When you finish your book, BlindProof gives you a single file — a proof bundle — that you send to your publisher alongside the manuscript. It is small, sober, and readable. It proves the manuscript you are delivering is the one you have been working on all along.

flowchart LR
    M[Your manuscript] --> P[Your publisher]
    B[The proof bundle<br/>one PDF, one small checker] --> P
    P --> V[Run the checking tool]
    V --> R[Confirmed: this manuscript<br/>existed on these dates]

What is in it

The bundle is a zip file containing four items. Most of the time only the first matters to you:

  • The PDF. A calm, plainly-typeset document. The first page is an attestation of authorship. The following pages show your writing timeline — days you worked, word counts, sessions — a short cryptographic appendix, and a single page of instructions for the publisher. It contains zero words from your manuscript.
  • A canonical record. A small machine-readable file that holds the fingerprints of your saves, the dates on which each batch was registered, and the stamps from the public registrar. This is what the checking tool reads.
  • A signature. A short file that proves the canonical record came from BlindProof and has not been altered since.
  • The checking tool. A tiny script — under a couple of hundred lines — that your publisher can run. It works on any computer that has a recent Python installed and it does not phone home to BlindProof. It verifies everything on its own, against the public registrar.

What your publisher does

Your publisher runs the checking tool on your manuscript. The tool calculates the fingerprint of the exact file they received, looks for that fingerprint among the saves listed in the canonical record, and — if it finds a match — confirms three things in turn:

  1. The signature on the bundle is genuine.
  2. The fingerprint of the manuscript they have matches one of the entries in your timeline.
  3. The registrar's public stamp on that entry is valid and real.

If all three hold, the tool reports confirmed, with the date and a reference to the public record anyone can check. If the manuscript is different from any save in your timeline — even by a comma — the tool reports that plainly, and the publisher knows.

What it does not prove

The bundle proves when the manuscript existed and that it is the same file you worked on throughout. It does not, by itself, prove which human was at the keyboard. For that, conventional evidence still matters — your contract, your drafts, your correspondence, your relationship with your publisher. The bundle is one more thing in the stack, and the one thing that is harder to forge than all the others combined.

How long it remains valid

Indefinitely. The registrar's stamps live outside BlindProof, in a public record that is widely mirrored and designed to outlast individual companies. A bundle produced today will still check out ten or twenty years from now, regardless of whether BlindProof is still here.