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Dr. Ralph Wilson, a marketing expert who has self-published, serves up some interesting advice in his Web Marketing Today. He discusses formats and even Adobe Acrobat substitutes. Meanwhile here’s what he says on the issue of password protection:

“E-book publishers seem paranoid that someone will steal their intellectual property and e-mail it to a friend. And they will–occasionally. This is my take on the matter. Few people who spend $25 or more on an e-book are likely to e-mail a copy to friends. And most of the people who collect such illicit freebies never read them–nor would they have likely bought the e-book if they couldn’t get a free copy. I argue that you lose very few potential sales by leaving password protection off your e-book. It’s not an issue to loose your sleep over–this from a writer who has had hundreds of articles pirated onto websites by ignorant or unscrupulous webmasters. People who steal from others are seldom successful in business and are unlikely customers.”

The TeleRead take: What’s true of business-oriented books may not always be true of other categories. Still, at this point, the audience for e-books is so tiny that publishers of protected material may well be at a disadvantage compared to those selling similar books without protection. Whatever the category, consumers will balk at inconvenience and at stupid protection tricks that, say, make it difficult to transfer e-books back and forth even between readers’ own machines. A TeleRead approach, allowing easy file sharing, without charging extra for intra-household transfers, would be far superior. Of course, ideally enough online books would be paid for by a national digital library fund to make such issues moot in many cases.

(Wilson item spotted via Jerry Justiano’s Pocket PC eBooks Watch.)

 
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