Sell PDF & Digital Documents Online Securely. Stop sharing, theft, piracy

Why sell digital documents and PDF files online?

Selling digital documents, PDF files and other information products online has many advantages, including:

• Reducing costs – saving on paper and postage
• Time savings with electronic distribution
• Reaching new markets
• Environmental benefits (less ink and paper)

However, the main disadvantage is that electronic documents can be easily copied, shared and pirated.

When selling information products online (digital documents) there are 3 main issues to consider:

1. What is the best document format to use – i.e. ePub or PDF
2. How to distribute documents – i.e. sell PDFs on your web site or through a third-party site such as Amazon
3. How to protect documents from copying, sharing, piracy and theft.  How do you stop your intellectual property from being copied and shared freely or prevent someone stealing it and selling it as their own?

The commonest documents sold online are:

• PDF files – generally ebooks or training courses
• Legal documents and compliance documents
• Reports – research reports, valuation reports, analyst reports, law reports, market reports

These all contain valuable intellectual property that represents monetary value to a business.

Preventing revenue loss should therefore be the number one priority if you intend to sell digital documents.

There are really only two main document formats, ePub or PDF, to consider when it comes to selling documents online.

Choosing the document format you publish in depends on whether you are willing to trade multimedia and interactivity for security and consistency of appearance across multiple devices.

ePub

The ePub format (XHTML) was developed specifically for Internet publishing:

• It supports multimedia and interactive (epub3) elements
• You can create responsive ebooks that resize automatically on some devices (except for multiple columns and tables)
• It can be better suited to smaller devices if you have very large documents as it is much lighter than PDF (i.e. has less features)
• Users can choose between different ePub readers but you will find they all display content slightly differently
• Users must install Adobe Digital Editions, which has been the subject of privacy concerns – Adobe collects data regarding reading habits and all loaded ebooks and transmits this information to Adobe’s servers in plain text
• DRM protection is weak at best.  There are many applications (including free ones) dedicated to the removal of ePub protection (DRM)

PDF

The PDF format was developed to ensure cross-platform consistency of appearance (form and format) across all platforms.

• If page presentation format is important (i.e. you want your pages to display consistently across all devices) then PDF is the better choice
• Users must install a PDF Reader / Viewer
• PDF DRM protection is available from multiple vendors who specialize in document security.

If you are reading this article because you want to sell documents online securely then PDF format is your only secure choice.

Where you sell documents online depends on various factors:

• How popular your web site is and how much traffic it generates
• If you use offline campaigns to drum up online sales
• How easily you can integrate ecommerce into your site and effectively manage it
• How your payment provider handles chargebacks and what control you have over your documents when this occurs
• If you willing to give away a proportion of your earnings in exchange for using a marketing platform such as Amazon (it can be 30% to 65%)
• Whether a marketing platform forces you to use its own file formats or document security

If you sell legal documents online, sell research reports or sell analyst reports, you will most likely want to have these made available from your own web site since potential customers will have had a chance to see relevant information of yours that is related to their purchase rather than competitor information.

By comparison, an ebook aimed at the mass market may benefit from the promotion opportunities available from using a fully configured marketing platform (at a price).

There are many different companies that tell you that they can help you sell PDFs online securely.  But is that really the case?  Here we review common security methods used and their value.

Passwords

PDF password protection is one of the commonest and cheapest methods of securing PDF files.  PDF documents are encrypted with a password to prevent unauthorized access, and PDF restrictions can be applied to control some document use (e.g. preventing printing).

However, it is completely useless as a form of document protection because:

1. Users can share the document password with others and post it online along with the document
2. Passwords can be removed by password recovery applications
3. Adobe permissions (these control how a document can be used – i.e. allow or deny printing) can be easily removed in seconds by free online password removal tools

And of course, there is the problem of creating, distributing and managing passwords to begin with.

Secure Downloads

Secure download systems rely on generating a unique download link for each user when they purchase your documents online.  They often combine this with a password protected file, and the user is given the download link and password after purchase.

However once the user has downloaded the file and has the password to open it, they can then share these with others.

So although secure downloads and passwords may stop users arbitrarily downloading documents they have not paid for from your site, they do nothing to prevent someone who has paid for a document then giving it to others for nothing.

DRM

A good document DRM system uses multiple security technologies to prevent copying, sharing, printing and piracy of your documents.  These include:

• Document encryption to prevent unauthorized access
• Public key technology rather than passwords
• SSL for secure key transfer to authorized devices
• Licensing controls to identify users and devices
• The ability to transfer licenses between devices – see ebook DRM & license transfer
• Proprietary security techniques to control operating system behaviour – i.e. to stop screen grabbing applications from operating effectively
• Dedicated secure viewer applications to control document access and use

See our DRM technology to better understand how these components make up an effective document security system.

Some document DRM systems rely on plug-ins to Adobe Acrobat but these bring with them their own problems, including compatibility issues, security issues (plugins can be circumvented by other plugins) and failure to continue working after Acrobat updates.