Should you prevent people to get your eBook before they pay for it?
By Alain Thibault, Monday 16 October 2006 on 00:00 :: eBook Security :: #2 :: rss
I recently read an article written by Michael Hopkins, a Web marketer and owner of BizzyDays Ebook Publications (www.bizzydays.com). His article is titled "How to Prevent Theft of Your Ebooks".
In this article, I react to Michael Hopkins' article, especially when he talks about practical measures you can take to prevent people from accessing your download pages or passing your ebook on to others.
When the author talks about protecting your eBooks from illegal downloads, he presents the most common mechanisms used to prevent illegal access to your eBooks. Basically, the concept is to avoid anybody who did not pay for your eBook to get access to it.
I believe that proceeding this way is a big mistake.
Don't you think you will get more people interested in buying your eBook if they can take a look at it? If one of your readers who purchased your eBook would like to send it to friends so they can see how good it is, why would you want to avoid that? There are no reasons to prevent people who could be interested in buying your eBook from being able to take a look at it.
When you want to purchase a book in a real-life book store, you take the eBook in your hands, look at the back cover and at some pages inside the book. Then, once you see that the book is interesting, you purchase it.
Should the purchase process be any different with your eBooks?
I, for one, think that the purchase process should be the same with eBooks.
The protection mechanism you plan to use to protect your eBooks should allow any potential client to get a copy of your eBook, take a look at it and, once interested, purchase it to get the full content. Preventing people to take a look at what could interest them is, in my opinion, probably the worst way to make a success with your eBook. With the Internet, you have access to a huge distribution pipe and you should take advantage of it as much as possible.
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Alain Thibault
www.secure-ebook.com
References:
Michael Hopkins, How to Prevent Theft of Your Ebooks.
Comments
1. On Saturday 11 November 2006 at 06:59, by Katharina Gutsche :: site
References:
Michael Hopkins, How to Prevent Theft of Your Ebooks.
www.bizzydays.com/reprint...
Re: bookshop (pay for reading) vs. library (read all, don't buy)
Dear Mr. Thibault,
when looking a little deeper into your concept I understood that you would have it that people can read the entire ebook before buying, and you call that a "bookshop".
I would rather call that an open access library.
People are not allowed to go into a real bookshop and read the entire book and then leave the shop withoug buying, they do so in a library where nobody would bother them for reading through whatever.
To someone who wants to establish a business in knowledge (regularly the contents of scientific books or articles) to provide an open access library is not attractive.
I know this from myself that I can speed read through any book, keeping in mind the info I need, and then set the book aside without taking it with me, if they are books in a library.
In a bookshop the assistants would walk up to me and interrupt such behavior if I ever practiced it.
So if you have a virtual "bookshop" you need such virtual "shop-assistant" - which could be built in by allowing to read no more than the excerpt the author defines in advance.
In science this has been the abstract and the search words.
Sincerely,
Katharina Gutsche
www.Auto-Thera.com
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Katharina Gutsche, M.A. Psycholinguistics, Dipl.-Psych.Clinical Psychology
State licensured Naturopath (Psychotherapy)
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2. On Sunday 12 November 2006 at 22:49, by Eric Maziade :: site
Hi Mrs Gutsche,
I don't think Mr Thibault is proning a entirely open library.
The model that we propose here is to allow people a peek into your work by providing them with a sample version of your electronic book - not the complete version.
Where the system gets interresting is that the complete version can be obtained very rapidly by purchasing the eBook right from the sample. Only once the purchase is made is the sample "unlocked" and the full version becomes available to the customer.
Regards
--
Eric Maziade
Secure-eBook
3. On Sunday 21 January 2007 at 04:28, by Fat Fingers :: site
You raise some interesting points. I'm in the final stages of writing my own eBook too and my main concern is people passing it on to others via P2P networks and the like.
By making a sample version available if this gets onto the P2P networks it could actually act as a driver to bring legitimate customers to a site so long as the main book is encrypted in some way so that only the original purchaser can open it.
The trouble is that I've not found a reliable way of doing this.
4. On Thursday 1 February 2007 at 12:25, by Eric Maziade :: site
You might be interested in checking out our product, Secure-eBook.
It only allows people with a valid activation key to open the full version of the eBook. And it makes sure that a key can only be used by one computer at a time.
In other terms, once a key has been used on a computer, it cannot be used from another computer.
5. On Monday 5 February 2007 at 08:20, by Katharina Gutsche :: site
Good fences make good neighbors.
Reading the whole book?
Dear Mr. Thibault,
One of the company's representatives wrote:
"It only allows people with a valid activation key
to open the full version of the eBook. And it makes sure that a key can only be used by one computer at a time. In other terms, once a key has been used on a computer, it cannot be used from another computer."
Did these people buy the book definitely before opening it?
Does the key open up reading without having bought?
What I want to do is to write an abstract, as is the custom in science,
and even in a book shop when looking for a novel it is usually the jacket one reads, and not the whole book.
Are you planning to modify to become eligible for scientific writers?
A modification according to my suggestions might also be attractive to your business and to writers of smaller pieces of literature like short stories, poems etc.
Best regards,
Katharina
6. On Friday 16 February 2007 at 14:33, by Alain Thibault :: site
When building a secured version of your eBook with Secure-eBook, you need two PDFs: one will be the sample (or the abstract) and the other one will be the full content. Both PDF files are included in the secured eBook.
Then, when someone opens your secured eBook, he/she is only able to read the sample (or the abstract). To get access to the full content, this person needs an activation key and to get an activation key, he/she has to purchase your eBook. Only after the purchase is done will an activation key be created and sent to the purchaser.
From what I understand, I think the concept should work for scientific writers. Right?
Regards,
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Alain Thibault
Secure-eBook
7. On Monday 16 April 2007 at 02:12, by Ambareen
I like the idea. Only I'm a little confused as to the mechanics. Should I upload both these pdf in the "Create or Modify Product" part of your site?
When my customer wants to pass on the sample or abstract how will this work ie how do they send it?
Pls. clarify
Ambareen
8. On Monday 16 April 2007 at 15:18, by Alain Thibault :: site
Secure-eBook doesn't host the secured eBook for you. After building your secured eBook using the Secure-eBook Packager, a file is created in, by default, a directory named "My Documents\Secure-eBook", locally on your computer. This is the secured version of your eBook.
Then, if you wish people to be able to download your secured eBook from your Web site, you will have to upload it to your Web site.
If one of your customers sends your secured eBook to a friend, this friend will only see the sample because the eBook won't have been activated on his/her computer yet.
And to activate it, he/she will need to purchase the eBook to get the activation key required to get access to the full content. People can even start the purchase process from inside the eBook itself.
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Alain Thibault
Secure-eBook
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