Quote:
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.
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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.