Did you know that approximately 22.5 percent of all book sales are made up of e-books? Those book sales bring in a whopping $ 8 billion in total sales. There are many downloads!
If you are a freelance publisher and have a lot of e-books, you might be surprised to find out how much potential revenue you are losing due to lost book sales and copyright infringement of your work.
Studies show that the average e-book consumer is an honest Abe, with 69 percent having purchased all the books in their collections. When it comes to the overall book market, the statistics are also very positive, as 75 percent of all e-books offered for sale are actually purchased.
Yet illegal downloads make up a worryingly significant portion of the 25 percent of e-books that are not purchased. It is estimated that more than $ 2 billion in potential revenue from book sales will be lost in the current year due to piracy and other forms of content infringement.
A solution to piracy problems
You work hard and spend hundreds of hours creating educational, entertaining and stimulating e-books for your readers, so why should someone else benefit financially from your efforts?
Securing your documents properly means preventing them from falling victim to various types of negative events:
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Unauthorized distribution
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Copying
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Screenshot
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Illegal reprints
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Use documents beyond authorized access time
When it comes to protecting your car or home, you can install an alarm or lock all doors. But how do you protect your content from being stolen by a profiteer who doesn’t want to pay to read it? Or worse yet, people who would take your content and resell it to others?
While the prospects may seem bleak, there is good news.
You don’t have to be the victim of predators who would access or reuse your works without offering adequate compensation. There are many methods you can use to protect your e-books with specific software and even some useful services.
How exactly is an e-book protected?
As an e-book author, you probably already know that digital books can be protected against piracy, but if you’ve ever wondered about the process involved, here is a brief overview.
Protecting an e-book means preventing its unauthorized use. Generally, this means preventing your books from being read by anyone other than the person who bought them or who gave you specific permissions.
Under normal circumstances, you, the author, want to make absolutely sure that your work is not obtained, copied, transformed, or transmitted in any way by anyone without your express permission.
That said, there are two main ways to achieve this goal.
- Legal protection of copyright
The first and easiest way to protect your e-books from piracy as a self-published author is to register your copyright to prove that you are the original creator of the material in question.
The next step is to include a simple copyright statement and a page on the cover of the book.
This page acts as a warning to potential hackers while allowing you to take legal action, if necessary, once your book is published and someone decides to infringe the information.
To make sure you cover all your bases, it is important to include verbiage on your copyright page that refers to various legal protections, such as:
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A copyright statement
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A statement of all rights reserved
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Legal disclaimer
Depending on the nature of your book, you may want to include your contact information on this page, as well as your unique ISBN.
It may also be necessary to speak with an attorney to clarify the wording of the copyright statement that you include in your book, as well as the level of legal protection that the specific statement provides if you end up having to enforce it.
If for any reason you find yourself dealing with a clear case of content infringement, having the legalities in place makes it much easier for you to stop the infringer and / or seek compensation if necessary.
- E-book encryption
The second and more technical method of protecting an e-book involves using digital rights management (DRM) or data encryption to create a “lock” that prevents anyone without the proper “key” from accessing the content of the book.
If you use e-book distribution platforms like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s FairPlay, your e-books are automatically encrypted with every sale. However, if you plan to sell your e-books independently, there are several options available for e-book encryption.
Protection technology Adobe Digital Editions
Adobe’s ADEPT digital rights management system is the most widely used by independent book sellers.
It allows you to create your e-book in PDF and XHTML formats, then encrypt it so you can manage who can receive and read your document.
Another great benefit of using ADEPT to protect your e-books is that it makes them available for download and use on all major word processing platforms like Windows and Mac systems, as well as e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.
In addition to protecting your books directly with Adobe software, there are other options for eBook encryption software and services that you can explore to see which is best for your particular book protection needs.
Lock Lizard – Offers DRM software that protects your intellectual property against theft and being intentionally compromised. The software even comes with a free demo option.
Edition Guard: If you don’t want to encrypt your e-book yourself, Edition Guard is a service that uses Adobe DRM or Social DRM to protect your books.
This service has several features that make it an excellent option. One highlight is that, unlike Amazon and Apple-based e-book services, you never have to pay this provider a share of the proceeds from the sale of your book. All you pay is the service and you can enjoy all your income and sales profit.
Another advantage is that you can provide potential readers with secure access to your books on more than 150 different types of mobile devices and applications.
More ways to reduce e-book piracy
While completely stopping hacking is nearly impossible, there is still a lot you can do to dramatically reduce the chance of infringement:
- Improve accessibility
While some digital pirates enjoy stealing content, in many cases potential readers end up looking for free copies of books because they are not available in an easily accessible format. This is a simple solution that is often overlooked.
- Set up Google alerts
A good trick that every writer can use to find out if their work is being accessed or used without permission is to set up Google alerts. Just take a single sentence or paragraph from your book and set an alert for Google to notify you if and when that sentence or paragraph is published online.
- Use DMCA takedown notices
Once you track down piracy instances with Google alerts, the next step is to issue the offender with a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice, which instructs a search engine or web hosting company to permanently remove pages that contain your copyrighted content from the Internet.
Use these tried and true anti-piracy solutions to help avoid the problem of lost revenue and reduce potential competition from those who intend to steal and duplicate your information.
