The Price of Ebooks!

[dcalder]

Originally Posted by April Hamilton

However, there are internet trolls out there who think all digital media should be free and therefore gladly post links for order fulfillment pages or server-resident files in their various usergroups, chat rooms and online communities (fancying themselves cyber-Robin Hoods, I guess) so anyone who sees the link can get the product without paying. Surely, many people here have come across sites like I'm describing while googling for ebook sites? That kind of link-sharing is a far cry from lending or giving away a book, CD, DVD or ebook you've purchased and are now ready to pass on.

My suggestion in that case would be to do what one of the zine publishers that I've purchased from does: use sendspace.com or something similar. Their links have a time-based expiration. The zine seller in question would send out the links to the buyer after the Paypal purchase, but then they were just getting started with electronic offerings and were dealing with upwards of 50 different zines, some of which would not regularly have sales, so that made sense for them. For someone dealing with a limited number of files, you could upload them on a regular schedule to the service and just change your Paypal receipt to give them the new link whenever you re-did the upload. It's not perfect, but it provides somewhat of a middle ground while you get your ideal situation working.

Note: after a quick glance at sendspace.com itself, it apparently also allows the link's expiration to be tied to a maximum number of downloads. To minimize the need to redo the uploads, you could set the maximum downloads to something that was unlikely to be exceeded unless the link was pirated.

[JeffElkins]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I said that I regard it as a bargain. You may be able to go to Walmart and buy books at that price, but I can't. The typical paperback book in the UK costs about £7-8 -- about US$15. For someone living in the UK, therefore, being able to buy an eBook for a third to a half that most definitely is a real bargain.

OK, given your situation it's a (relative) bargain. If I had to pay US $15 for a mass-market PB I would most definitively balk!

[April Hamilton]

This is off-topic but I know there are some writers following this thread so:
The IndieAuthor Guide to Promotion is now available at my site, and as with all the IndieAuthor Guides, it's free. Enjoy!

[Elsi]

Originally Posted by April Hamilton

Thanks for the offer, I may take you up on it. Right now, I'm working on how to get the necessary code added to my webpage. I have considerable experience as a web applications developer, but haven't done any development of shopping cart-type stuff.

I've used PayPal tools on another site of mine for mail-order stuff, but I'm struggling when it comes to instant-fulfillment download purchases. PayPal tools can be used for this if you put a download link on the order confirmation page, but then there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous buyer from copying down the link to that page and sending it to all his friends or posting it online in one of those awful 'ebooks should all be free' sites.

I tried buying some page widget code that was supposed to generate a unique, one-time only URL for the confirmation page of each paid order, but I could never get it to work right. That was a couple of years back, tho...maybe there's a more elegant solution I'm unware of, because I know lots of people have this functionality on their pages. I just don't know how the heck they do it!

April -- the Digital Scrapbooking folks have solved this problem. You can order, pay, and immediately download using a URL that is not valid for any other user. The scrapbooking folks typically allow you 30 days in which to repeat the download.