PDF Security for Small Publishers

Safeguard PDF Security can provide many benefits to smaller publishers, including:

• Be up and running quickly
• Apply a simple but effective protection system
• Administer and enforce your copyright controls
• Integrate with your web site for selling
   

A smaller publisher can be a book or magazine publisher, or they may be a training organization, or a financial services company publishing reports to their investors.  Their customers may have individual documents or they may take subscriptions to particular services (a 1 year subscription to a particular magazine or to a series of financial reports, for instance).

A smaller publisher may have a large number of documents and/or a large number of customers, but tends to deal with customers on a one-by-one basis.  If you regularly need to treat customers in groups rather than as individuals, and/or need to allocate selections of documents rather than one-offs, please refer to PDF Security for Large Publishers which may be more helpful.


Be up and running quickly

The effectiveness of LockLizard Safeguard is reinforced by the simplicity of getting going.  Where LockLizard are providing the hosting you can plug straight into a pre-built environment, start protecting documents and adding customers straight away, and not have to worry about maintaining your own server.  If you already have a csv format list of customers you can upload them and the system will automatically issue licenses.


Apply a simple but effective protection system

The LockLizard Safeguard system provides you with a standard template for protecting documents, dividing controls up into: Customization, Document Access, Expiry and Validity, Environment Controls, Printing and Viewing, (View Watermarks, Print Watermarks), Display Settings.  You can preset these so that you get a consistent result for your documents.


Administer and enforce your copyright controls

Depending on the type of 'work' Copyright may exist for 50 up to 120 years after the death of the last author/contributor.  Contrary to some beliefs, this does not mean that what you deliver has to be guaranteed to last that long.  Baked clay tablets can last 2,000 years but they are not commonly used these days, and DVDs may last between 30 and 100 years (assuming that you can always find a machine to read them on).

But do think about what you are delivering/licensing.  If it is a book, people expect to be able to read it both online and offline.  On the other hand, some training courses are very valuable and you may not want to license them for perpetual use, but only for a week or a month.

You  can use Access controls to allow potential customers to sample documents before buying them, perhaps increasing market interest, or watermarks when documents are sent out for evaluation, protecting your own rights.


Integrate with your web site for selling

Smaller publishers do not always want close integration between their web site(s) and the licensing administration system.  This can be because existing accounting systems for membership management (customer or client management) may be manual, so there is little efficiency gain.  In the same way, training courses are not necessarily sold directly over the web because of the need to check capability or the availability of a minimum number or schedule a trainer.

However, where the publisher is selling directly over the web, an additional feature - eCommerce integration, can also be purchased.