How to Protect PDF Today Blog

Is there any way to protect your ebooks from being shared when you sell information online? Using ClickBank is a potential solution. By accepting payment with ClickBank, it gives you some security. But by no means all you need.

How does it work? The first step is to create a sales page for your product. A customer clicks on the buy link and Clickbank allows them to enter their credit card information. If the information is valid, ClickBank sends the customer your download page. If the payment is not valid, ClickBank will not send the customer your download page. As a result, a customer can only access your page if they provide a valid form of payment

What happens after the customer pays for the ebook and downloads it to their computer? There is nothing that prevents that customer from sharing your ebook with everyone because the PDF document can be easily shared.

One possible solution when you sell information online is to use a password protection membership website to control distribution of the ebook. Instead of placing the information in a PDF, you keep it on one of these websites. When someone accesses a product that I have on one of these websites, they need to enter their user name and password and if there is a problem with payment they cannot see the information. I have a main course that costs $700 and has a $97 monthly subscription. That is not something I want being distributed for free. On the other hand, I might not care as much for a $27 ebook.

If only some people share it or your niche is a Christian or home school niche, ideally you will not have to deal with blatant sharing. One good idea is to include in your product a phrase such as ?This is not a free ebook. If you received this without paying for it, please delete it and email me letting me know who shared it with you.? Most people are honest and will delete it. They know that they should not have the book and will delete it without a problem because of their honesty.

The bottom line is that unless you keep your information on a password protected membership website or use PDF protection software, there is not much you can do to stop sharing when you sell information online.

So, you have written your first masterpiece, perhaps the best selling ebook ever and you decide the best way to protect it is to create a PDF with a complicated password that no one will ever guess that will prevent anyone from stealing your work, changing it in the document or claiming it as there own. After all, that is the best way to protect PDF ebooks, right? Wrong!

Unfortunately, using a password alone to protect your PDF file is not going to provide the protection that you envisioned.

For years, individuals have been using PDF documents in an attempt to protect PDF ebooks. There are two ways that this protection was used. Firstly a password can be used to prevent all but those authorized from using the PDF file from opening it.

Secondly, and most commonly, passwords are used to prevent others from editing the ebook, or printing it, copying it, etc. Of course, any one can print a password protected ebook by making a screen shot of the page and then printing it from a different document, so you need to make that as difficult as possible.

As for being able to modify your ebook, that is not too difficult either. There are plenty of programs available online that can break the encryption used to protect PDF ebooks. That’s right, unfortunately using a password alone is not going to provide you with the password that you need.

Some programs can break your encryption in a matter of minutes, while older version might take a longer time. One consolation may be that these programs do not reveal your password, they just make it useless, so you don’t have to worry that a password that you use to protect other things has been compromised.

There are also hacker programs that are designed to crack your password. But these are not nearly as convenient for a criminal as programs that break the encryption protecting a PDF ebook. Because a password breaker can take a much longer amount of time to figure out the password, and slows down the hacker’s computer exponentially.

Choosing to use a PDF with a password protection just is not enough to ensure that your document is secure. Speak to IT professionals and explore additional PDF protection options to get solid and cost-effective recommendations on how to best protect your PDF documents.

When creating a PDF eBook, you need to be careful that PDF security concerns are adequately addressed.

Many eBook authors and producers today neglect to protect their PDF in a thorough manner, and end up regretting their PDF security decision later. Because in a few short weeks, hundreds, if not thousand of unauthorized copies of their PDF are sure to become available online.

How do PDF thieves manage to get around the PDF protection many eBook authors choose to use? The primary method most PDF authors use is the password method. That is, a special password they send to authorised users of the PDF file by email. Together with instructions to use this password to enable opening of the PDF file, this goes a small way toward preventing massive copying.

But the PDF password method to open a PDF file alone, can never be very effective, for the simple reason that the password can be easily passed along with the PDF file itself. As part of a single zip file, attached to the PDF file.

This is the main weakness in PDF security using a password, alone. It’s too easy for others to pass around.
What other solutions are there? Adobe Acrobat does have other, more complex PDF security methods, but they are quite complex. And Adobe Acrobat is not a cheap program to buy in the first place.

A number of alternate, more secure PDF protection methods are available that not only place a protective shell around your PDF document, they also offer real-time monitoring of who is opening your PDF file and how often.

This is offers much greater security because not only do you know that your PDF file has been opened, you can also withdraw user access to your PDF files at any time you want.

If you have a question about how enhanced PDF protection and security systems like these work, please take a look at these Frequently Asked PDF Security Questions.