Ebooks are popular with people because of the convenience and ease of sharing. For ebook sellers, the advantages may be a little troublesome. There would be no profits if ebooks are allowed to be shared freely.
There are many ways for you to choose to protect the ebooks which are sold on ebook-selling platforms like Amazon, Kobo, etc. Although each method can not meet all your needs for ebooks, you could learn to combine them according to your needs.
In this post, you could learn how to protect your ebooks with ComPDFKit. And the advantages and disadvantages of each method.
Ways to Protect Ebooks with PDF SDK
Watermarks
The long-term history of watermarks could prove its validity. Watermarks could be used on postage stamps, passports, and other documents to vouch for their authenticity. That’s just what ebooks are facing. Ebooks without watermarks would be shared more than twice by each buyer. It turns out that watermarks could protect ebooks effectively.
The most important thing is watermarks protect ebooks’ online piracy without hindering sharing. ComPDFKit provides text and image watermarks. Watermarks could embed the information of the identity of the content, its owner, ebook retailers, or users who purchase ebooks. We could choose whether the watermarks could be seen or not.
For the methods on how to add watermarks on ebooks or PDFs, please refer to our other blog here.
Password
ComPDFKit provides the methods of setting passwords to ebooks. It’s a good way to protect your ebooks with passwords. There are two types of passwords in ComPDFKit — the owner password and the user password. Ebook sellers could set user passwords for their customers to open and read the ebooks they bought. The owner passwords could be used to set some restrictions. They can choose the options which their customers could do. Here are the restrictions below.
- Printing: Whether the buyers of the ebooks could print or not, and the quality of printing.
- Copying/Pasting: Whether allowed to copy/paste the content from the document or not.
- Document changes: Decide who could modify the document contents except for document attributes.
- Document assembly: Choose the processes the customers could do with the document like inserting, deleting, and rotating pages.
- Commenting: Whether the buyers could create or modify document annotations (including form field entries) or not.
For the methods to set the passwords to your ebooks, please turn to another post.
Other Ways to Protect Ebooks
Now, convenient information sharing makes the protection of ebooks more difficult, but there are still various ways to protect the rights of ebook sellers. Except for the ways we mentioned above, some other ways also work for protecting your ebooks such as legal copyright protection, google alerts, and DMCA takedown notice. It's a good way to protect your ebooks with a clever combination of approaches.
