Quote from: katie1348 on April 21, 2013, 03:32:05 PM

Quote from: mynameismonkey on April 21, 2013, 02:39:03 PM

Quote from: katie1348 on April 21, 2013, 02:22:12 PM

How will you stop people copying the books and posting them online for free?

I like the idea and I have a book, that might be of interest. But I also want to make some money from my books, so would want them to be protected from direct posting online.

K

As with any file you are free to use the DRM of your choice. However, the simple truth is unless you want your readers to sign up for accounts on things like Adobe Content Service you are either going to need to publish through a DRM-enabled store (like Apple or Amazon) or forgo DRM and drive sales through ease of use, knowing that there may indeed be copies being made. If it is important to preserve digital rights, you should not be self-publishing unless it's on a platform that controls the reader from sale to reading, in other words, a platform that sells the file and safeguards it, usually by tying it to certain devices or software readers.

I would appreciate hearing more from you on the subject. http://electricbookworks.com/kb/self-publishing-ebooks/drm-and-self-publishing/ might point you in the right direction also.

This exactly highlights my problem. I very much doubt that I will be selling significant quantities of my books, as they are not that kind of book. So if there are lots of shared copies, then there might only be a handful of sales, and at that point, it is not worth me releasing an e-book version of a book.

On the other hand, I don't sell many printed books either, since I have stopped pushing them, too much profit for the shops and not enough for me. Which is why the e-book would be really nice.

If anyone has any thoughts of how to get round this problem, I would appreciate it.

K

I think you have to decide between two competing forces: one the one hand, publishing a DRM-free ebook makes it easy for people to obtain it which hopefully diminishes copying. Ease of use and ease of purchase drive sales. On the other hand, if copies are made and you do not follow up with takedown notices, you will see a bigger amount of unlicensed copying. Going with a bigger vendor reduces this significantly, but that's what you pay the hefty fees for. If you're selling a $200 textbook, you probably need protection. if you're selling a less than $5 ebook, you probably should just self-publish and admit that some people will copy it. Middle ground is to get the book on the apple store, on kindle store etc.