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 dollars in total sales. That’s a lot of downloads! If you are a self-publisher who has a lot of a course in miracles out there you may be shocked to find out how much potential income you’re missing out on 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. As far as the wider book market goes, the statistics are also very positive, with 75 percent of all E-books offered up for sale actually being purchased.
However illegal downloads make up a disturbingly significant portion of the 25 percent of E-books that are not purchased. Estimates are that well over 2 billion dollars in potential book sales revenue will be lost in the current year due to piracy and other forms of content infringement. You work hard and put hundreds of hours into creating thought-provoking, educational and entertaining E-books for your readers, so why should it be that someone else benefits financially from your efforts? Securing your documents properly means preventing them from falling prey to several types of negative events:
When it comes to protecting your car or home, you can have an alarm installed or deadbolt all your doors. But how do you protect your content from being stolen by a freeloader who doesn’t want to pay to read it? Or worse yet, people who would take your content and resell it to others? You don’t have to fall victim to predators who would access or repurpose your works without delivering proper compensation. There are many methods you can use to safeguard your E-books with specific software and even a few useful services.
As an E-book author, you likely already know that digital books can be protected from piracy, but if you’ve ever wondered about the process that goes into it, here’s a short overview. Protecting an E-book means preventing its unauthorized use. This usually means preventing your books from being read by someone other than the person who bought it or who you otherwise gave specific permissions to.
Under normal circumstances you, the author want to make absolutely certain that no one obtains, copies, transforms or transmits your work in any way without expressed permission from you. The first and simplest way to protect your E-books from piracy as a self-published author involves registering your copyright to prove that you are the original creator of the material in question.
This page acts as a notice to potential pirates while also making it possible for you to take legal action, if necessary, once your book is published and someone decides to infringe on the information. To ensure you cover all of your bases it is important to include verbiage in your copyright page that speaks to several legal protections such as:
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 to an attorney to be clear on the wording of the copyright statement you include in your book as well as the level of legal protection the specific statement affords you if you end up having to enforce it.
If for some reason you do find yourself dealing with a clear case of content infringement, having the legalities in place makes it much easier for you to stop the offender and/or seek compensation if necessary. The second and more technical method of protecting an E-book involves utilizing Digital Rights Management (DRM) or data encryption to create a “lock” that prevents anyone without the proper “key” from gaining access to the contents within the book.
If you use E-book distribution platforms like Amazon’s Kindle or FairPlay by Apple, your E-books are automatically encrypted with each sale. However, if you plan on selling your E-books independently, there are several options available for E-book encryption.
