Did you know that approximately 22.5% of all book sales are e-books? These book sales generated a total revenue of $8 billion. There are a lot of downloads of e-books everyday!
If you are a self-publisher who has many e-books in circulation, you may be surprised to find out how much potential profit you are missing out due to lost book sales and copyright infringement of your business.
Illegal downloads represent a worrying share of 25% of e-books that are not purchased. It is estimated that over a $2 billion of potential revenue from book sales will be lost this year due to piracy and other forms of a content breach.
This should be a wake up call for all the people in the eBook business and major steps should be taken to prevent e-book theft and piracy.
Table Of Content
- A Solution To Piracy Concerns
- How To Prevent eBook Theft And Piracy
- Make Use Of Anti-Theft eBook Software
- How To Stop E-book Theft And Piracy: Conclusion
- FAQs
A Solution To Piracy Concerns
You work hard and spend hundreds of hours creating inspiring, educational, and fun e-books for your readers, so why should anyone else benefit financially from your efforts?
Securing your documents means preventing them from falling prey to various types of adverse events:
- Unauthorized distribution
- Copy
- Screenshot
- Illegal reprints
- Use of documents beyond the authorized access time
You can install a GPS or lock all doors when securing your car or home. But how do you ensure your content from being stolen by a recruiter who won’t pay to read it? Even worse, protecting it from people taking your content and reselling it to others.
While the outlook may seem dismal, there is good news. First, you must not be the victim of predators who access or reuse your works without paying you an adequate amount. E-book theft and piracy can easily be prevented with specific software and valuable services.
How To Prevent E-book Piracy And Theft
As an eBook author, you probably already know that eBooks can be protected from piracy. But if you’ve ever wondered what the procedure looks like, here’s a quick rundown.
Under normal circumstances, the author wishes to ensure that his work is not obtained, copied, transformed, or transmitted in any way by anyone without their permission.
There are several ways to do this:
1. Legal Copyright Protection
One way to protect your e-books from piracy as a self-published author is to register your copyright to verify that you are the initial creator of the material in question. This is the easiest way to stop e-book piracy.
The next step is to include a simple copyright statement and a page at the top of the book. This page serves as a warning to potential hackers and, at the same time, allows you to take legal actions if necessary once your book has been published and someone decides to breach your information.
To make sure you enclose all of your bases, it’s essential to include verbiage on the copyright page that talks about various legal protections, such as:
- A copyright statement
- A declaration of all rights reserved.
- Disclaimer
Depending on the nature of the book, you may want to include contact information on this page, as well as a unique ISBN.
You may also need to discuss with a lawyer to be clear on the diction of the copyright statement you entail in your book. The level of legal protection the specific information offers you should also be known.
2. Adobe Digital Edition Security Technology
Adobe’s ADEPT digital rights management structure is the most widely used technology by independent booksellers.
It allows you to organize your e-book in PDF and XHTML format and then encrypt it so that you can manage, approve, and scan your manuscript.
Another advantage of using ADEPT to protect your eBooks is that it makes them available for download and use on all major word processing platforms. This includes Windows and Mac systems, as well as e-reading platforms such as Kindle and Amazon.
In addition to protecting your books directly with Adobe software, there are other options for eBook encryption software and services. You can review and see which one works best for your particular book protection. Here are two of them.
• Lock Lizard
Lock lizard offers DRM software that protects your intellectual property against intentional theft and compromise. The software also includes a free demo option.
• Edition Guard
If you don’t want to encrypt your e-books yourself, Edition Guard is a service that uses Adobe DRM or Social DRM to protect your books.
This service has several components that makes it a great option. One surprising thing is that, unlike Amazon and Apple-based e-book services, you never have to pay this provider a share of the profits from the sale of your books. All you pay for is the service and you can enjoy all your income and gains from sales.
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.
3. Improve Accessibility
While some digital hackers enjoy stealing content, in many cases, potential readers end up looking for free copies of books because they aren’t available in an easily accessible format. Unfortunately, it is a simple solution that is often overlooked.
4. Set Up Google Alerts
A great trick any writer can use to find out if their work is being accessed or used without authorization is to set up Google Alerts.
Just take a genuinely unique sentence or paragraph from your book and set an alert for Google to inform you if that sentence or paragraph is published.
5. Use DMCA Takedown Notices
Once the Google Alert hacking cases have been identified, the next step is to send the infringer a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice.
This gives an indication to search engine or web hosting company and they permanently delete the pages containing your copyright content.
Make Use Of Anti-Theft E-book Software
In layman’s terms, E-book DRM is a copyright protection to protect a file by making it accessible only to those who buy it.
Every time someone downloads an e-book and shares it with others, the book’s copyright owner loses income because people share it for free instead of the other person buying the book.
The nature of the internet makes file sharing easy and piracy monitoring virtually impossible. Therefore, it was urgent to find another way to protect the copyright of digital content. Thus was born the eBook DRM or Digital Rights Management.
Digital Rights Management uses technology to secure the copyrights of the content. In essence, with DRM, control of digital content passes from the content owner to a computer program.
There are several routes that a business can take towards DRM. For example, they can block the transfer of confidential emails to their servers. In addition, digital publishers can restrict access to the copying and printing of their content.
Some benefits of DRM e-books include:
1. DRM Adds More Layers Of Protection To eBooks
For digital publishers, the primary benefit of DRM is that it adds an extra layer of security to their eBooks and other copyrighted content.
2. Revenue Protection
The Internet presents both risks and benefits for digital publishers. First, publishers benefit from reduced publishing costs. Publishing an interactive e-book is relatively easy, and once published, you can make as many copies as you like at no additional or nominal charge. As a digital publisher, you can also seize advantage of low-price online sales and marketing initiatives, thereby saving on marketing costs.
On the other hand, peer-to-peer sharing sites open avenues for free sharing of copyrighted material, and therefore if your content is shared on these sites, you will lose revenue. However, if your e-book is DRM protected, you can stop this hacking and thus you don’t lose income.
3. Increased ROI
As mentioned above, the Internet allows you to publish e-books at a minimal cost and thus achieve additional savings without printing costs. Plus, there’s value to unlock with instant global delivery with no shipping costs.
This earned value can be lost if your content is not copyrighted. With DRM-protected eBooks, you can significantly increase your ROI by making sure you get paid for your intellectual property instead of losing it.
4. Maintain IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) Control
Control not only who sees your content but also what they do with it. With DRM, you can define a life cycle by setting an expiration date. Once this date is attained, your e-book buyer will no longer view the content.
5. Prevent IPR Theft
By implementing DRM in your published work, you can deliberately or not prevent the theft of your PPE. Furthermore, you can also check who has seen your documents and if they have tried to pass your authorization to other people and who these other people are.
6. Ensure Regulatory Compliance
As a digital publisher, you need best practices to ensure your content is strongly encrypted and licensed so that no unauthorized person can access it. Your business may involve dealing with many people outside of your corporate network, which means that you will need to provide those people with authorized access to confidential information.
How To Stop E-book Piracy And Theft?
E-book theft and piracy not only hurts your sales but also hurts your brand reputation. Therefore, you must take all measures to prevent your e-book from being stolen or freely shared.
There are several ways to provide necessary protection to your digital books like, registering a copyright, adding a copyright disclaimer page in the book, taking assistance from companies providing DRM protection, and so on.
FAQs
eBook publishers can keep a check on piracy by registering a copyright for their work, adding a copyright and other necessary disclaimers in the book. Along with that, DRM software and Google Alerts should be used for keeping a check on unauthorized access of e-books.
If you came across someone indulged in piracy and theft, you can report and send the DMCA notice by going to the official website of copyright alliance.
Yes, eBooks can easily be pirated. In fact, it is one of the most common practices that take place on the internet. Digital thieves steal your content and make it available for free.
There are dedicated DRM software available for publishers that can help you to secure your digital books by encrypting them. Some of these software are, Adobe Digital Edition Security Technology , Lock Lizard, and Edition Guard.
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. As the name suggests, it protects your digital rights by maintaining a control on the copying, pasting, and printing, and distribution of your eBooks.
