Need Recommendations please.

[PattyGale]

I am preparing to write an ebook this year.

I would love to hear some recommendations from those regarding e-book software...it is useful? a waste of money?

What securities do you put in place to prevent theft? I.e. ISP tracking? Coding? Should I offer this on my own server or use Clickbank?

Do you recommend letting your merchant know there might be a surge in activity?

And...lastly... can you make an e-book interactive? Meaning, once the user downloads it, are there ways to allow them to fill in certain pieces of information?

I found some nice sites for ebook resources, but would love to hear from those who have published and done it.

Thanks!


Patty

[alice]

[PattyGale]

Thanks Alice,

I very much appreciate your suggestions. I am on a Mac, and have Word with a PDF creator... just haven't used it on this machine yet (just switched a few weeks ago)

I'm glad to hear that I can make this ebook interactive as that is one of the main selling points.

Someone here posted in another thread that they had 15 downloads of an ebook and only 2 payments received. I guess that's one of my biggest concerns...is people sharing links to the actual download and I didn't know how to prevent that or if you even can prevent it.

As far as the "surge" in activity, Yes, I hope to sell alot of them! But, I had read somewhere once that a merchant shut down an account because there was so much activity in the guy's account, the merchant assumed he was scamming people. This was a while ago, and I don't remember exactly where I saw this.

I definitely want my customer experience to be the most pleasant, yet I want to make sure it is also secure for me as well.

Thanks again Alice!

Patty

[alice]

You're welcome! Sounds very exciting.

You can password protect your PDF documents which should keep those who stumble upon your ebook by "accident" from downloading it. But a password won't keep people from sharing the book.

Good luck and be sure to ask any questions along the way.

Alice

[PattyGale]

[Dieter Kling]

jkhjzuzt

[PattyGale]

I will definitely take a look at that.


Patty

[Andre Chaperon]

Hi Patty,

My personal advice would be to simply not concentrate on "if" people will copy/distribute your intellectual property. The sad fat is that it WILL happen! Rather focus your efforts on effectively marketing your product.

I had someone, a customer actually, that copied my entire website verbatim, and then sold MY product from it. My initial thought was shock and horror. But really, there just ARE people out there that will steal.

When you offer a timed guarantee on a product to help increase credibility, is it not also stealing when you know a customer has asked for his money back as the product is not what they need, but you know for a fact that they will be using it...? How do you combat that?

Sure you can use applications Digital Vault (which is a great program), or Corel Rudl's eBook Pro, but as already mentioned, these techniques simply hamper your customers ability to read your product.

Focus on making money and forget about losing the odd sales here and there.

I create all of my digital infoproducts in Word and then just convert to PDF. I enable full PDF security (no copy/paste etc) but I do allow for printing. I have not detracted from the experience of reading the product, but have still implemented security measures that do "help" deter thieves.

One last deterrent you could invest in is Goddady's [url=https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/copyright/landing_choice.asp?isc=&se=%2B&from%5Fapp=&prog%5Fid=GoDaddy&mscssid=2105419]
c-Site copyright protection service[/url]. I now use it on one of my sites simply as a deterrent. (just scroll down to the bottom):

I hope this helps

[HowardH]

[Andre Chaperon]

That's very interesting Howard. Is this document in the form of a PDF? I wonder how it's implemented if it is a PDF. Obviously if would not be viable if this was a manual process however if one could get a PHP/CGI script that would compile a .DOC into a PDF in real-time during the order process, then we have a winner!


markets a PDF maker, though I haven't really investigated further.

The ANSI Standards Committee; is that ? I wouldn't mind emailing them and asking what they use... I wonder if they would reply

[HowardH]

[kidino]