Quote:
Originally Posted by April Hamilton
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.
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Hmm, googling for "unique download url" gave me this:
http://www.earlyimpact.com/productca...l-products.asp
I know nothing more about it than you see here, but there are products out there.
This article might be useful:
http://www.wilsonweb.com/ecommerce/w...ital-sales.htm
rant
As far as file sharing goes, don't worry about it. Focus on making it easy for us to give you money. You can't stop sharing, even if you only sell physical books printed in purple ink on green paper with red hashing to make them hard to scan. Giving someone a digital file just makes it easier to share. What I think you need to aim for is making it easy for people that are willing to pay. So you need to balance any obstacle you put up against the benefit you get from it. That means (ie) if you only accept Paypal, people who don't have PayPal accounts will be much more likely to steal the book (you've just said you don't want their money).
To use the music example, since I buy a lot of music, I only buy physical CDs when I have to, and I always try to buy the "right to rip" as well. Artists who won't sell that right have to accept that I'm going to rip the CD anyway, then dump the plastic rubbish they forced on me as soon as I can. So artists that sell what I want get to pay 1 cent or so for the download that I actually want in return for the full retail CD price, those who will let me rip the CD get paid extra, the rest get a CD sale and their CD is resold second hand within a week. Some artists are surprisingly stupid about this - Ani Difranco will not accept money for the rip, and gets quite upset at the idea that some of her fans do not treasure cheap plastic trash with her name on it. Penelope Swales is the opposite - she sold me a data DVD with her whole discography on it because she's not set up to sell that much download from her website (to me, that's 12 albums for $120 which I think is a bargain).
Compare this to physical books - I buy them, read them once or twice, then give them away. With an ebook, I'm not going to give them away, so they have less value to me in that sense - they're hard to share. What I do want is to be able to tell people your URL and know that they can get a free book or two direct from you. At that point you stand to make more money - instead of my friends reading the physical book without paying you anything, they might buy your ebook instead. That alone says to me that you probably want to price the ebook lower than the pbook, possibly even at something silly like "twice the return I normally get". To us book buyers that's a silly price - we're paying $2 for a book instead of $10. Or, as likely, we're paying $10 for 5 books instead of 1.