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How can you track an ebook?
September 17, 2009 | 9:37 am
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By Paul Biba
Booktwo proposes an interesting question about how to track the distribution of an ebook (leaving aside piracy and paid versions). I wonder if there is any answer for this:
I’m working on a couple of eBook projects, and thinking about distribution. Sales figures are important: in the music world, we’ve already seen the move to recording downloads in addition to physical sales for compiling charts. (Chris Heathcote has some thoughts on the latter, and notes we’re not yet at the per-play stage – c.f. bkkeepr.)
My question is: how do you track, monitor and analyse downloads? Particularly of free ebooks?
Imagine this scenario: there’s a free ebook. It’s hosted in one place, and there’s a single addressable URL to access it. This will probably be a pointer, rather than a direct link to the actual file. This means the file can be delivered, but some analytic measure can also be triggered: recording number of downloads and their point of origin.
Yes, it’s perfectly possible someone will repost the file elsewhere, and this will be untrackable. Without imposing arcane and nasty DRM, we will have to ignore this. We’re also ignoring official (and presumably paid-for and therefore separately tracked) downloads available via eBook vendors elsewhere.
We’re talking about a single, canonical, trackable address for a single eBook. Are people doing this? How? Thoughts and answers in the comments, please.
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Comments:
You can’t, really. You can track the number of downloads from your site and not “allow” any other sites to publish it, but you’ll never be able to track whether Chuck passes his e-book file over to his friend Susie (instead of directing Susie to your page), without some arcane,DRM bloatware “dial-home” feature built into the e-book itself. All you can do it look at the numbers downloaded and estimate. It’s not an elegant system. But really, if the book is free, does tracking it and being exact as possible really matter that much?
I think the use of 2D-barcodes or QRcodes as coupons will have some use for free e-book follow on tracking.
At least it will bring the follow on readers to a url, for additional content.
So some measure of use, and sharing will be evident.
You can certainly track shared copies! Through a very simple, non-arcane, non-DRM scheme you can get a reasonable estimate of the number of copies being read: include a link in the book to a web site and track visits to the web site by unique IP. (I have never implemented such a system, but there is a lot of research into this, especially with respect to application tracking.)
The system isn’t going to be perfect. Some book reading applications may not follow external links. Further, people who convert the book into a non-HTML/ePub format and distribute the converted content will avoid your tracking. However, it will work reasonably well and give you useful numbers.
Since many readers are now natively ePub and don’t have Internet connectivity, you may wish to put the tracking link on the title page. Then, with any luck, the library software utilized by the user will contact your link instead of the reading device.