Did you know that approximately 22.5 percent of all book sales are made up of eBooks? Those book sales generate a whopping $8 billion in total sales. That’s a lot of downloads!
If you’re a self-publisher who has a lot of eBooks, you might be surprised to find out how much potential revenue 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 buying all the books in his collections. When it comes to the book market in general, the statistics are also very positive, with 75 percent of all e-books offered for sale being purchased.
However, illegal downloads make up a disturbingly significant part of the 25 percent of e-books that are not purchased. It is estimated that more than $2 billion in potential book sales revenue will be lost in the current year due to piracy and other forms of content infringement.
A solution for hacking problems
You work hard and put hundreds of hours into creating thought-provoking, educational, and entertaining eBooks for your readers, so why would anyone else benefit financially from your efforts?
Securing your documents properly means preventing them from falling victim to various types of negative events:
- unauthorized distribution
- copying
- screenshot
- illegal reprints
- Use of documents beyond the authorized access time
When it comes to protecting your car or home, you can install an alarm or lock 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 even worse, people who would take your content and resell it to others?
While the outlook may seem bleak, there is good news.
You don’t have to be a victim of predators accessing or reusing your works without offering adequate compensation. There are many methods you can use to protect your eBooks with specific software and even some useful services.
How exactly is an eBook protected?
As an eBook author, you probably already know that digital books can be protected from piracy, but if you’ve ever wondered about the process involved, here’s a brief overview.
Protecting an E-book means preventing its unauthorized use. This usually means preventing your books from being read by anyone other than the person who bought them or to whom you have given specific permissions.
Under normal circumstances, you, the author, want to make absolutely sure that no one obtains, copies, transforms, or transmits your work in any way without your express permission.
That said, there are two main ways to achieve this goal.
- Legal copyright protection
The first and easiest way to protect your eBooks 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 legal copyright statement and page on the book cover.
This page acts as a warning to potential pirates while also allowing you to take legal action, if necessary, once your book is published and someone decides to violate the information.
To make sure you cover all your bases, it’s important to include verbiage on your copyright page that talks about various legal protections, such as:
- A copyright statement
- A statement of all rights reserved
- Legal notices
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 a lawyer to clarify the wording of the copyright statement you include in your book, as well as the level of legal protection the specific statement gives you if you ultimately have to enforce it.
If for some reason you find yourself dealing with a clear case of content infringement, having the legalities in place makes it much easier for you to apprehend the infringer and/or seek compensation if necessary.
- Encryption Ebook
The second, and more technical, method of protecting an e-book is to use digital rights management (DRM) or data encryption to create a “lock” that prevents anyone without the proper “key” from gaining access to the book’s content. .
If you use eBook distribution platforms like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s FairPlay, your eBooks are automatically encrypted with each sale. However, if you plan to sell your eBooks independently, there are several options available for eBook encryption.
Adobe Digital Editions protection technology
Adobe’s ADEPT digital rights management system is the most widely used by independent booksellers.
It allows you to create your eBook in PDF and XHTML format, 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 easily available for download and use on major word processing platforms like Windows and Mac systems, as well as e-readers like Amazon’s 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 from theft and deliberate compromise. The software even comes with a free demo option.
Edition Guard: If you don’t want to encrypt your eBook yourself, Edition Guard is a service that uses Adobe DRM or Social DRM to protect your books for you.
This service has several features that make it a great option. One highlight is that, unlike Amazon and Apple-based eBook services, you never have to pay this provider a portion of the proceeds from your book sale. All you pay for is the service and you get to enjoy all of 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 devices and mobile apps.
More Ways to Reduce eBook Piracy
While completely stopping hacking is nearly impossible, there is still a lot you can do to drastically reduce the chance of a breach:
- Improve accessibility
While some digital pirates enjoy stealing content, in many cases potential readers end up seeking 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 very unique sentence or paragraph from your book and set up an alert for Google to notify you if and when that sentence or paragraph is published online.
- Using 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-hacking solutions to help avoid the problem of lost revenue and to reduce potential competition from those who try to steal and repeat your information.
