Hi, this is Phil.

If you sell, or hope to sell information products such as eBooks, reports or even courses, then very soon the dreaded word - Piracy - will raise its ugly head.

In this two-part blog I would like to share with you what I do to help prevent my books being downloaded for free, and save you a whole heap of money by avoiding solutions that look good, but don't work. Please keep in mind that this is just my personal view. Other publishers may well differ, but I hope it gives you some insights that will help you make the right decisions and save money at the same time.

Before I start I need to make a bold statement.

It is not possible to make any book - electronic or paper - free from illegal distribution on the InterTwitter.

It's like protecting your home against burglars. You want a home, not Fort Knox. You have to find a level of eBook security that keeps honest people honest and understand it is not possible to completely prevent unauthorised downloads by determined thieves.

There are three ways of downloading a book for free.

1. One is to somehow hack into the seller's website, or get hold of the ClickBank notification or the url to the download folder and so download the book without paying anything.
   
   
2. Another is to see if someone else has already seen an open copy (say, because they bought it) and simply uploaded an open copy to some site or other for others to download for free.
   
   
3. Finally, buy the book, get a refund, keep the book!

There are many websites that offer 'solutions'. For example, there is a well-regarded website at www.bookguardpro.com.

I have no gripe or objection to this particular site, and there are many others like it. I am just choosing it as one example out of many.

For about $17 a month you can encrypt a pdf file in such a way that if your buyer demands a refund you can disable viewing of their copy of the file. You can also do this to someone who is transferring your book illegally. This sounds good, and the website has a good deal of 'terror copy' about how much money you are losing, to help you make the 'right' buying decision. They helpfully provide an example of an encrypted book for download to prove to you how secure their program is. However, there are some considerations you might want to keep in mind.

Firstly, it only works in Windows so you have immediately lost any sales to people with Macs, iPads, iPhones, Kindles and eReaders. Personally I don't think this is too good.

Secondly, if you would like to go to this link ...

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5036978/Bookguard.pdf

You will find an open and unencrypted copy of the very same example they have on their website. I am not a techie and I did this in five minutes using software that is already on my computer and freely available. I agree the resolution isn't very good but if I took the time to do the job properly I'm pretty certain you wouldn't tell the difference. I assure you my 10 year old nephew could do this with any book that has been protected by any software, from anybody.

Whichever way you look at this kind of solution, it is locking the front door but leaving a back door open.

And this is just for PDF files. That's only half the problem ...

Digital Rights Mismanagement

I regularly buy Kindle eBooks from Amazon despite not having a Kindle. I prefer the Sony eReader. Ordinarily the DRM (Digital Rights Management) software within Kindle eBooks would not allow me to transfer the files to my Sony, or anywhere else. Yet it takes me a whole five minutes to strip the DRM management from the Kindle eBook and transfer it to my eReader. So much for DRM.

Indeed I don't see the logic from Amazon's point of view. If I couldn't remove the DRM restrictions then I would not have bought the book in the first place. And if I can strip out the DRM then what was the point?

Paper books

I have an out of print paper copy of an old gardening book written in 1912. Using OCR software I converted the relevant chapters into an e-book which I sent to one of my friends who is an avid gardener.

I hope I've made my point when I say that it is impossible to prevent any book, document or information product from being made available for free transmission on the Internet.

The best we can do is to make life difficult for any potential pirate, but in assuming that all buyers are potential pirates we risk undermining our relationship with the buyer. How would you feel about going into a department store if they insisted on giving you an airline-style full security check before you walked through the door? Or accused you of being a potential thief and having a security guard follow you everywhere‽

I've spent 20 years trying to get round this philosophical problem at a cost of many thousands of pounds, and I believe that we have to view the problem in a different way.

First, what are we losing, exactly?

Ok, every download of a free version is a book we haven't sold. True. But would someone who deliberately downloads a pirate copy buy a copy if they couldn't get it for free? I doubt it. Some may, but most would not. They are not wired that way. They are thieves. In this sense we haven't lost a potential sale, we are just galled that someone's got our work for nothing.

It can even work in our favour.

A few years ago I was interviewed over the telephone by a (so called) Internet Guru. Without my permission this interview was transcribed and turned into an eBook which was subsequently offered as a free bonus to his delegates, a bonus that they could sell on.

When I first saw this book for sale on the Internet I was incensed. How dare he! It even had my name on it as the author of a book I'd never written! I immediately headed for the phone with the intention of contacting the international team of Judge Dredds that are my lawyers. (My lawyers even scare me – and they're on my side!)

But then I started to get some enquiries from people who had bought the book and had followed up my name on the Internet. Some of those people turned into customers and I realised that far from being a loss maker, my pirated words were acting as an advertisement, bringing people to my sites. And arguably, this advertising was for free!

So the book is still out there and even though I regard it as a pirated copy it is acting as an advertisement and I have no problem with that.

The other issue about piracy is that, in reality, authors have lost nothing. If we had sold a tangible object such as a computer and someone had run off with it without paying, we would have suffered the loss of the cost price of the computer - an actual financial loss. But with eBooks there is no cost price. There is, therefore, no financial loss. I agree there is a "no sale" but it's highly debatable whether or not it would ever have been a sale.

My experience is that:

• Piracy cannot be fully avoided no matter how hard you try.
  
  
• For those downloads that get through the net there is no financial loss and indeed, if you have advertising at the back of the book for more of your products, you can actually gain sales for other products.
  
  
• Furthermore, the more you try to prevent piracy with the use of elaborate software the more you alienate your honest buyers.
  
  
• If you make the "solutions" too complex you will be inundated with requests for passwords and support because they cannot open the file,and also refunds because they are cheesed off with attempting to open all the security restrictions that you have in place.
  
  
• The eBook market is a bigger place than just PDF files. A typical eBook should now have a PDF, Kindle, smartphone and general .ePub set of files. How do we protect them all?

The whole thing can escalate into a whirlwind of negativity that does no one any good. In fact the major issue is usually that the author is simply peed off because the mice have been nibbling at his grain harvest.

And that is all that is happening. Despite the doom-sayers, this is not a cloud of locusts decimating your livelihood. These are mice nibbling away at your grain harvest and we stand in danger of spending so much time killing the mice that we forget to sell the grain.

So, what should we do. Have no restrictions whatsoever?

No. I have developed a system that has sufficient security without alienating my customers. It provides a balance between locking the windows of your home when you're away and having it surrounded by barbed wire, nasty dogs and machine gun emplacements. The determined burglar can still jemmy a window, but he won't get much.

And as for my more expensive items, I have developed the internet equivalent of using an ultra-violet marker pen to catch the little bleeder the moment he tries to 'fence' my materials.

And this, good reader, will be revealed in my next blog.

In the meantime, having saved you, I hope, a shed load of money by not buying largely useless anti-pirate (anti-customer?) solutions, why not invest some in a nice cup of tea, or one of my nuclear espressos, while you peruse my commercial break below...

Best regards

Phil Gosling

Commercial Break:

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Recipe for Nuclear Espresso.

The Disley Coffee Making Ceremony You'll need one of these: It's a Bialetti.

Fill the holder with strong, finely ground coffee and tamp it down with a teaspoon so that it is reasonably compressed.

Heat it up with the lid open and listen for the moment when the coffee just starts to come up the inner spout. Then take it off the heat.

As soon as the coffee starts gently bubbling over, alter the heat to produce a really slow flow of coffee from the inner spout. The idea is to get the water to percolate through the coffee powder as slowly as possible.

The first coffee will look like black syrup. Use this for your cup, discard the rest. Sweeten to taste. Die happy.

(Getting a 'crema' on a Bialetti is not easy as normally this is produced by coffee machines working under pressure. However, by experimenting with different grinds, filling the coffee holder to its maximum, tamping it down at various pressures and slowly letting the cooker pressure push the water through the grinds, something akin to a frothy crema is possible.)