Sort of a catch-22 here.

[acrimon]

Basically I want to sell an ebook. That means after payment through PayPal, I want to send people to a page in my site to download the file from.

Obviously I don't want that page indexed, so I should have a robots.txt file, right?

But then the robot.txt file is available for public viewing and anyone with half a brain can see where the file is anyway.

Any thoughts?

[twistedspikes]

zip the ebook and set a password on it?

[AstarothSolutions]

You dont need a robots file.txt file.

Create a .Net/ php page with a small onload event handler. If they provide the correct code then the page actually servs up your ebook, if they dont give the correct code they simply get a html page saying the code is invalid.

Normally you would restrict either the duration or number of downloads each code is allowed to make to prevent people from advertising/ selling it after purchase.

[twistedspikes]

I still think just zipping it with a password would be much easier though.

[acrimon]

Thanks for the replies. The problem with zipping it and having a password is that when someone orders the book through paypal, I don't think there's a way to give them the password.

[twistedspikes]

Ah right, so your not planning on being in contact with these people?

[AstarothSolutions]

If you are selling through paypal then you either setup a script on your site to send the email with the password/ url or unique url in response to the IPN call that paypal makes or just include the password in the conformation email from PayPal (i think)

[ezrapound]

you could try using an autoresponder so when you get an email saying that they paid, your computer sends them an email with a password.