MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

I Am Going To Steal Your Ebook!

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Disclaimer: This is not a post teaching you to do this evil thing. I, myself  HAVE NEVER EVER stolen any eBook. I don’t need to, I make enough money to live. Just look at this post as a guide to have a basic understanding on how this process works and how you can protect yourself when you do selling eBooks.

Internet Marketing in whatever niche you are, involves a lot of selling. And 90% of the products is what we known as info products or eBooks. But do you know that most of the eBooks that these people are selling are usually just ripped off for free? Or do you know that a lot of people have a ton of good quality eBooks they don’t even pay for? Well I’m sure you, as a reader of this blog are selling ebooks, or have plans of doing it, so this post can be a good read for you.

So most people do sell ebook via Clickbank. In selling, you are required to do two pages.  First is the salespage itself, where you would pitch your  offer and the second is the thank you page, a page where a paying customer would be redirected once they have made the payment. The problem that I see most of the time is that any user can easily access the thank you page!

One good example is the sales page Problogging BluePrint. So the main page is the index page while the download page is just located in /thanks.html part. Fortunately the link is broken (and its unfortunate for paying customers!). The surprising thing is that most salespage function that way! They have their download page accessible almost by anyone! I mean the usual locations are the ff:

  • /thanks.html
  • /thanks.php
  • /download
  • /download.html
  • several variations

That’s why Im not surprised that a lot of info products just leak like crazy. Another bone head mistake most marketers do is make use of robots.txt. Oh my god! I mean yes you can tell the search engine to hide your download page but have you forgotten humans can read it? So if you guys want to steal someone’s ebook all you have to do is try to go /robots.txt and see the page that they disallow, LOLS… Another problem is the noticeable increase of PDF search engines. It’s surprising that a lot of popular eBook shows up on sites like pdfsearchengine. So altogether, it’s an uphill battle to combat eBook fraud and many people so far fail to do it!

How Do I Protect My Ebook?

Well this post is not really a guide on info product protection but since we’re here Im going to give you some brief explanation of what I know. If you’re a clickbank merchant, make sure to have a third party plugin to protect your download page. One that I came across through is DlGuard. Since I have never done any clickbank thing I would suggest you to do your own research as to what the reliable third party plugins are.

If you’re just selling a product yourself, using e-junkie is the smartest thing. E-Junkie is one of the leaders in terms of handling info product automation, payment and delivering the product itself. So far I haven’t heard any issues about using it and even the top marketers like Darren Rowse is using it. $10 per month is a reasonable price for the protection that it gives.

Lastly, always do a simple Google check for your eBook to see if some asshole is sharing it. Use the query “title of your ebook” filetype:PDF, and then scan the search results THOROUGHLY. It’s because sometimes you protect your download page a lot that you forget the file itself. Again some morons do buy it only to share it to other people while other people accidentally (or not) stores it on their server only to leak when someone does a search. Just consider doing this like a maintenance thing.

It can also be a good option to use the PDF search engines we mentioned earlier to your advantage. Search for your eBook, then if you find it, contact the site owner and tell him to remove it (or send him a DMCA notice). Obviously when someone shares it, he knows it’s illegal so he’d just more likely laugh at you when you contact him. The best thing to do is send the notice to their hosting provider by doing a quick whois on the site that distributes your copy illegally.

Conclusion:

Selling eBooks is a big and still growing industry and unfortunately not a lot of people are techy enough to protect the hardwork they exerted. Protecting your own info product can be really hard but there are ways. Im not saying people are evil but put yourself in their situation. You are craving for some expensive info product and you see a flaw that would make it free for you, are you not going to download it? The obvious answer is the answer for 98% of us!

I don’t know about you but if you’re just letting your product leak like waterpipes, then I think your product and you deserves to be ripped off for free. After all security is part of any business model both online and offline that should never be neglected.  I would really love to have your opinion about it. Or maybe you can share your own tips that you implement yourself!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  12. I want to thank you for a very informative post. I’m writing a book now that I plan to distribute first as an e-book and this information is very timely for me. I’ve bookmarked the page and I’ll be back when I’ve completed the book (which for the moment has grown out of control).
    .-= Cynthia Wunsch´s last blog ..Saturday, October 24, 2009 =-.

  13. Im afraid this aint enough to protect your ebook from being stolen. It’s “unavoidable”, just like how music sharing is, and they spend more money on protecting their stuff than the infoproduct industry.

    Someone could still buy the product and then share it elsewhere.

    The best method is to find the place where they share it. Socialize with the people a bit, become a valuable member and kindly ask them to not share your product. Cuz if you choose to go violent nothing will happen and your product will still be shared.

  16. I also agree with George. Its impossible. I myself know some sites from where you can download e books of well known writers.
    Anyway nice post.

    Thanks
    TC

  30. That’s a good point and you hit it right with the music industry. But I think it’s also the fact that stealing info products is just 1/4 of how big the piracy in music industry is it’s kinda still controllable.

  32. I’m planning to make my ebook in the future and as early as now I’m gathering the important information to protect it. I’m glad you have written about this because this will add up to the knowledge I have gained lately. Thanks a lot.

  33. yes … lol
    didnt knew about those ways, but i personally read ebooks which are available FREE. and mostly interested in SEO and MMO ebooks and those things are shared on pro blogs all time.
    But good article for ebooks sellers as to be aware of such people

  34. yea this is helpful for both, ebook sellers and also newbie sellers who are not aware of such scammers or hackers

    this will help many to be on safer side but also somehow this post is helpful for scammers as well, lol

  36. No, that’s not the only site that shares internet marketing products. There are bigger sites and warez forums that shares ALL internet marketing products old or new(some products are even shared before launch date) even $2000 products. Some places are private some are public.There’s a crazy world of hackers and sharers out there.

    But as Ive said, protecting your info product from being shared is impossible. There are a lot of private torrent sites and warez forums out there. You’ll just go crazy trying to prevent it from being shared, because you can’t. But will this cause you to make less money? No. Some people will still buy your product anyway. P90x(a popular fitness product) is shared so many times in different sites, in fact when you google it you will even see the torrent links before the actual sales page.

    Piracy in a way is a form of flattery. If people shares your product, it means its useful and actually helpful, when no one asks for it then you already know what it is.

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