Well this post isn't meant for you to actually really steal an eBook but more of a guide on how it happens. How ebOok usually leaks like crazy.. Disclaimer: I DONT steal eBooks (eBooks Are crappy as always). I dont need to, I make enough for my living. First, some marketers who are selling ebooks do the mistake of putting robots.txt in their site. Yes robots.txt helps in hiding the download location from search engines, but on the flip side it only shows human where those files are. Remember robots.txt are visible to human. Example: AtomicBlogging Product, go to atomicblogging.com/robots.txt and you can see where the paid items are stored Second mistake is more targeted for clickbank merchants. They usually just have their download page on directories like /thanks.html, /thanks.php, /download.html and the like. This is a bonehead mistake for most marketers Example: go to http://www.probloggingblueprints.com/thanks.html and you should see the download page (link broken though). Third mistake, they don't do maintenance stuffs. On google you can search for the name of the ebook coupled by filetypeDF and it would yield you the ebooks w/o any efforts at all.. The mistake of most marketers who sell info products is that they just sell their product without caring if someone has already uploaded it to torrents or warez and etc. Of course there are always ways to protect it like using a third party software to deliver the product and process payments. You can also use some PHP codes (not that familiar though). And there's also E-junkie as an option. Anyhow the complete post about how people steal ebooks is written in my blog. Anyways Im interested to know what techniques you, yourself are using.
That's the only thing I dislike about selling digital products. I was thinking that if someone is willing to go through with this, they could just purchases something from CB and then promptly issue a complaint so they can get their money back. I consider this stealing as well.
or just skip all of that effort and get them from sources that share them illegally free or trade them - hurts people who go to the time and effort to write them and not all ebook authors are millionare rich guru ferrari driving rude jerks either Many serious ebook sellers are aware of these attempts by people to get them free and host the ebooks on a separate 3rd party secure site or use some sort of password, encryption, or download link guard type of script or shopping chart to protect themselves. Its more the ones who dont know what they are doing or upload a template or copy a reseller type site where the original had a security flaw.
Marketers make their big hit money in the first few weeks and then months after launch; especially the launch week usually makes them most of the money of the entire product life-span. So most don't care that much if it is copied after that. Marketers are not technical people ; there are a lot of resources they could use to prevent this problem, like simply use e-junkie or such to protect the product. However , if people want to steal it they can; there is no protection from that.
There was a way to find stuff like these (Clickbank products) & from what I can recall it was done by searching through Alexa. Forgot the search query though, & the exact steps.
This is a normal part of business. It's going to happen no matter what protection you use to safeguard your digital products. You are correct that SOMETIMES it is theft, but sometimes your product just didn't meet their expectations based on the sales letter. Best, Michael
This is so true. I almost see a business opportunity offering more secure ebook selling sites, but a lot of the same marketers fail to see the value in properly securing their intellectual rights.