PDF file worry

[Gazzali]

Hi there

Those books selling in Amazon.com or Zulu.com in pdf version- are they convertible to word? If so how if we want to sell books to prevent "copy" and reselling thieves

[Mynder]

You can't really prevent it.

There are knowledgeable people out there who will be able to circumvent basically every kind of protection you can dream up. If your book ends up a bestseller, you're guaranteed to have "free" copies floating around the web.

What you CAN do, though, is turn this into an asset instead of a liability. Promote your website and products in your ebook. Provide links that lead the "freeloaders" back to your site. If you can convince them of the value of your offer, you may end up selling an audio book, or whatever else to some of them, and are driving "free" traffic (i.e. traffic you wouldn't have otherwise) to your website.

[Clint Cora]

You can't really effectively prevent sharing of ebooks so what I do is to offer the initial buyer something of value as a bonus. For example, all registered buyers of my pharmaceutical sales careers programs gets a free custom resume evaluation from me. And for a dog training ebook I have, I offer free email support. Only registered buyers on record gets these extra perks.

The other thing that I do is make sure that in my ebooks, I have some notices about other programs. So even if an ebook is passed around, at least it will be free PR for me.

You always expect that in the digital world, there will be sharing of files so you might as well make the best of it.

[Curtis2011]

Originally Posted by Gazzali

Hi there

Those books selling in Amazon.com or Zulu.com in pdf version- are they convertible to word? If so how if we want to sell books to prevent "copy" and reselling thieves

Anyone good enough to successfully sell an ebook will be highly unlikely to bother stealing someone else's work when they can create their own.

Also, as others have said, there is no way to prevent someone from copy/pasting your ebook or modifying it. Even password-protecting it can easily be broken and anyone can learn how to do this with Google and free downloadable tools available online.

In other words, don't even worry about it.

[Brutha]

There are knowledgeable people out there who will be able to circumvent basically every kind of protection you can dream up. If your book ends up a bestseller, you're guaranteed to have "free" copies floating around the web.

That's even true for many paper books.
Scanning them isn't so hard. OCR technology simply works around any protection that you can think of.