How do you protect your ebook from piracy?

There are SO many threads on this subject here.

Short answer: you don't. You don't worry about it, you don't even try. You make sure your book has links back to your site and your affiliate promotions if any, you hope it goes viral and gets you a bunch of traffic.

I don't. I never worry about it. Piracy will occur, regardless of any method you employ. If the product is machine-readable, then it can be stolen. Instead, I produce a product and then start planning the NEXT product -- keep moving, and keep making money.

You have to make a few decisions about this.

Here are a few...

You can use an e-book creator as that seems to be one of their main selling points, to protect you against thieves. However this will not work on Mac computers and people may have to download software to read your book. Sometimes the people who sell e-book software distribute free e-books in PDF format rather than with their e-book creator. This should tell you the popularity of these e-book creators

You can use a shoppingcart like ultracart which has a wonderful feature that will stamp personal information on every page of a PDF file so if someone were to pirate the book they would be giving out a copy with their personal information on it. Seems like a good deterrent.

You can not worry about it. Most marketers do this. Many have been doing this for 10 years. People pirate music and software and have been for years, why would it stop now?

Most of the time, you are worrying about something that will never happen. You can drive yourself nuts to try and find a solution for this small problem that probably never will happen instead of working on creating more products.

Don't sell downloadable e-book. Sell tangible products. There are many print on demand places and cd duplication places so you could sell only tangible hard goods.

Of course, someone could copy your work in a photocopier and send it back or post it online too.

In my experience...do not worry so much about it. People selling $2000 downloadable courses don't worry about it and people can get a refund by just asking and keep the material, you shouldn't worry about your e-book being spread around illegally.

You may want to look at it the other way and worry about how TO spread the book around to get more leads and traffic. That's a bigger problem.

Split it on pages and create membership site (with optional gradual content delivery feature) based on it.
Some people do it and name it "mini membership site".

Same content, but "membership site" sounds more solid than "ebook".

Gleb

I agree that you should not worry about it. If thieves want your work there are a hundred ways they can get it, but then again it has to be a very salable product and worth the effort.

I have use e-junkie but just canceled that to go back to Paypal. Works OK for me. I also disable the print capability in the PDF when I format the book.

Like others have said e-book creators are a pain. I used them for years and got frustrated no end when buyer after buyer could not open them even when the keywords were sent. It appears that many programs will not work with them, including Vista and, of course, Mac.

God bless

Norma

As the others have said, don't spend too much time worrying about it and don't go to crazy links to protect your work. One of the things that annoys me the most is when e-book publishers don't allow you to print or copy stuff from a PDF file. I understand that they want to protect the work but if they took 5 minutes to search on google they would realize that there are plenty of ways to "unlock" a pdf and dump all the text into an unprotected .txt file anyway.

I saw something interesting in an ebook I read recently:

It had a caption saying:

To stop people illigally sharing my product, I have made 2 verions and submitted a fake version to all the torrent sites, if you have got this ebook for free and try to make money out of it - Good luck!

Don't know if it would work?

FWIW I always print out ebooks I purchase. Reading them on a computer while wearing tri-focals is a PITA.

I buy 3-hole drilled paper at XPEDX and get cheap 3-ring binders at Sam's Club.

If you make an ebook's PDF not printable I am stuck.

:-Don

I use Download Guard. Very tight security. Probably not foolproof but I haven't found my stuff being sold anywhere else.

I think one has to consider one's overall business model. Selling individual e-books is a fairly narrow and limited approach -- but if that's the extent of your offerings, then you're probably going to be concerned about protecting them from piracy. If, on the other hand, your business model uses those e-books to drive customers to much more profitable offers, then (while you may lose the upfront revenue from an e-book sale) those pirated copies may pay off with signups to your recurring membership sites.

Of course, there's always the debate about people who steal never paying for anything, including a recurring membership, but...

My take on product protection :

Have faith and then add something like this.


Congratulations as an extra special unannounced bonus >>Click Here<<<

You will receive life time updates along with a special report that will allow you to make the most amount of money with this course.

If it is not about making money then use something like this.

You will receive life time updates along with a special course that will allow you to get the best value from this report.

**********

Why do this?

It not only allows you to build your list it provides a possible profit funnel for future product release even if the person got your book for FREE doesn't mean that if enough value is there they will never spend money or that the copy ends up in the hand of someone who will.

Best luck with the success of your launch and remember be blessed and be a blessing.

There is a software called
ebook pro gold, which makes sure
the only person who is using the ebook is
the one who buys it.

Igor

"Energy flows where attention goes."

So be wise and don't focus your attention on piracy. That would just be asking for piracy to happen to you and also distract you from the actual work you should do.

FlashDrive - Bingo!
Best advice given.

Gleb

I converted my ebooks to physical books from a self-publishing company. It cuts the digital piracy for sure....but for offline piracy, then, only God knows

I for protect my ebook i put a password in the pdf document.

Even so it is not 100% sure but it is the method used by 99% of internet marketer. At least for me it is a secure system.

I use EBook Security Service, Download Best Software Security, Piracy Protection Software, Copy Protect Software, EBook Protection Software and it has worked great for me. Customer service is also first rate

Even Adobe or Microsoft hardly prevent piracy, all you need to worry about if your ebook can generate traffic to your website if it goes viral.

There's nothing that much you can do. You can sue, but it's not worth it. I know... It sucks!

I think piracy is immortal. I have read the tips here, I thought of my experiences with virtual theft and I got to the conclusion that you can not prevent it from happening. Especially if your product is so damn good! But you can not stop from what you are doing, either.
I also think you should worry less about something that could and would happen eventually. Focus on your work and make the best out of it before they do it.

Protecting your book against piracy is a total waste of time because there's absolutely no way that it can be done foolproof.

Take music files for example that are supposed to be done in such a way that prevents them from being copied. There's a way around that and it is called connecting two devices together and rerecording the music onto another device. Just because a file has the DRM, digital rights management attached to it doesn't mean that there's no way to copy it. People have discovered ways around all sorts of so-called protection schemes, so I wouldn't even worry about those for your book. Again, it is a total waste of time and money.

It will always always happen. You can lock up content, send DMCA, etc but don't stress out too much. Anybody can screen capture your videos or pass around your files so it's impossible to 100% secure your stuff.

Welcome to the internet