The rise of eBooks (a.k.a. e-books, electronic books) online has been one of the great successes of the Internet as it has made it possible for all web users to become authors and publishers of their own work. To help the avid author/publisher, an industry has grown up surrounding the ways to publish your book to the internet. This article will detail the options available for publishing your book to the internet along with the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

The three options each have security, control, and cost implications that will either suit, or not suit, each individual eBook author.

3rd Party Vendors

This is a scenario that will be familiar to most people. As the eBook author, you upload your eBook to a third party website who then take control of the marketing and selling your product in return for a commission on each sale made.

The shopping cart and payment processing interface with Paypal/etc. is completely taken care of by the vendor. You have little or no control over the marketing of your product on their site (how the product looks/branding/editing of product text) or on capturing purchaser’s details.

When a book is purchased from the site, the vendors is responsible for controlling if the book’s download link has a time limit or if the number of downloads attempts is restricted (to protect it from being downloaded by several people).

One disadvantage of using a third party vendor is that the author cannot compile a membership listing of previous purchasers so they miss out on the potential of future loyalty purchases. This could affect publishers who intend releasing several books and wish to build upon a customer base of previous customers.

Provide Downloads Through Password Protected Folders

This is an old approach to distributing eBooks whereby you make a public folder on your web server and configure it to be password protected. When a customer purchases a book via your site you send them details of the password and URL/folder for the download.

One advantage of this is that there is no cost involved, except for your time, but you will still require shopping cart software to manage the purchase.

But a major setback to this technique is the weak security of freely distributing the password and URL with people who could then freely redistribute the details to others that could download the e-book.

Sales And Digital Download Management Tools

This is a modern and more independent approach to distributing eBooks that involves using sales applications on your own server that look after the shopping cart process, securing download links & passwords, capturing mailing list sign-ups and allowing the creation of membership sites/products.

As the author has full control of the software, they also can compile a mailing list of previous purchasers and can configure how secure the download links are/how long these links are to be available for.

After the cost of the sales application, your only cost on each eBook sale is the commission to Paypal/whomever for the handling of the payment. The only operational overhead is the application setup and administration.

In summary: If you are an author that intends selling several e-books then choosing a Sales and Download Management Tool is the ideal option. If you have a single e-book for sale or don’t wish to capture purchasers in a mailing list then using a third party vendor is the simplest option for you.

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