How do I stop people stealing my ebook?…

Question:

Jim, I’ve completed and published to PDF my 1st Ebook. Your
lessons in 7 days to were excellent. The advice on free
publishing for the 1st six was appreciated.
(ref: “How To Write and Publish Your Own eBook… in as little as 7 Days”

I am unclear on one thing however and wonder if you could
help me understand it.

I plan to use ClickBank as a credit card processor and
sales agent along with my own website as I move toward
affiliations. ClickBank wants two web addresses, one for a
“sales pitch” page and the second for a “thank you page.
That alone isn’t a problem but I’m struggling to understand
a couple of things.

After completing a sale does ClickBank direct the buyer to
my thank you page and is the product downloaded from there?

That’s the way I have it set up but I have not published my
sited to the web yet. If that’s the case and I have a
separate website for thank you /delivery, how do I protect
it. If someone comes across it can’t they simply download
my book?

Thanks,

Marty

Answer:

Hi Marty,

You basically have 3 choices when it comes to ebook
security

1. You can use a locking program like Armand’s
www.ebookgenerator.com or www.cb-extract.com to “secure”
the file… however, you can create more time expense in
increased customer service than you save in security.
(Not saying you will, I’m saying you *can*.)

2. You can lock the PDF file with a password… but then
people can just pass on the password with the file… so I
don’t recommend it (though I do recommend securing your PDF
against allowing people to copy text or comment).

3. What I do is just change the download URL on occasion to
keep people from being able to pass that around… that
cuts down on mass stealing of ebooks.

PLUS, if you don’t EVER link to the download page from
anywhere on your website and make it a hard to guess page
name (678dhfYU76.html instead of download.html), then you
should never have to worry about anyone “accidentally”
finding your download page.

My bottom line opinion is that you can’t stop a
*determined* thief… so you just make it hard for the
casual thief to do much damage, and you focus on serving
the customer… 98% of the people out there are honest and
good… and we just focus on them.

I hope that helps

Jim

P.S. I did a humorous little piece on this in my blog
“Smacker Explains Basic eBook Security”