February 06, 2008

Should I Encrypt My Ebook?

Hi Angela,

First, great work on the Writers Weekly site, it's a very valuable resource.

I am working on some ideas on e-books. One question I had was, if it is produced in PDF format, how can it be prevented so that one person can't buy it, download it, then send/email to a couple other people, and so on and so on, etc. Is there a way to make it so that the only person who can read it is the person who bought it?

Any help/info would be appreciated.

Thanks!

M.

The more you try to encrypt/secure an ebook file, the most difficult it's going to be for honest customers to open and read that file.

I, personally, would rather make purchases easy for my regular customers than to make their book-buying experience a pain just to ward off the very occasional buyer who might be tempted to share one of my books with his/her pal. The chances that the "pal" would have purchased my book anyway are nil.