My last post touched on electronic books, and got me thinking about document protection. This post is meant to tell what can be done to protect files in digital formats.
When dealing with paper books, the #1 concern is that someone will buy the book, cut off the spine, scan the pages and post to the internet or resell. The great thing is that this is an incredibly rare situation. In fact, in my 15 years in this industry I do not personally know of this happening to anyone.
With an electronic file, or e-book, there are a multitude of concerns. For some reason, it seems a lesser transgression to copy electronic documents than paper documents. What does this mean? It means that you need to consider how you protect your electronic documents. Making PDFs of your book and selling them as downloads on your website is not enough. There are consumers who will take that PDF and e-mail it to others they know, or even post the link somewhere that it can be accessed by anyone. It is for this reason that you must consider Digital Rights Management (DRM) for your electronic files.
DRM allows for various levels of protection. You can restrict: altering the document, e-mailing the document to another person, the computer that the file can be read on, printing, and copying + pasting. This can be applied within PDF files, as well as within e-books.
You can also deter the above by watermarking the document when purchased. Software can be used to embed the purchaser's name, e-mail, membership number, or even computer IP address. With this written in the margin of the document the threat of embarrassment or lawsuit is significant enough to prevent unwanted dissemination.
If you need to get more technical than this please feel free to contact me. I have some very economical sources for e-book conversion, and some powerful tools for DRM.
Its your content, and that is what makes you unique. Make sure to protect it.
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