Any way to publish via net AND protect myself from piracy?

Factual Questions
1

Suppose I’ve written a small book that I advertise for sale on a web page.

Option A: actually print x physical copies of the book, customer sends me money, I post them a copy of the book. Of course, an evil customer COULD pirate this copy, but at least he has to go to the time and trouble of scanning or xeroxing every page, and in any case the quality of the pirated copy will probably be diminished.

Option B: prepare it as a .pdf file, customer sends me money, I email them the .pdf file. But now it’s out there in cyberspace as an electronic file. Can be copied, forwarded, distributed with a single click, every pirate copy as good as the first.

Is there any way to use electronic distribution but give myself reasonable protection against piracy? I don’t think it can be done, buy maybe some Doper knows better.

2

Stephen King’s “Riding the Bullet” e-book had some funky Acrobat plugin that required you to pay. IIRC, it was encrypted and paying got you the key.

3

Gunslinger is correct, Adobe Acrobat has a plugin called “WebBuy” that allows you to sell encrypted files. Adobe WebBuy does not seem like it is intended for small publishers. It appears that you need some heavy-hitting hardware to run the Adobe PDF Merchant, which encrypts a separate version for each buyer and each password.

Anyway, you can read about it on the Adobe site, in particular check out these two pages:

http://www.adobe.com/products/pdfmerchant/main.html

http://www.adobe.com/epaper/main.html

4

You should be aware that the Acrobat encryption was cracked very quickly and easily. If there’s enough demand for your book, it WILL be pirated.

5

There are plenty of secure sites on the web.
Every online bank depends on this.

The technology therefore exists.

6

Yeah, and that’s the point of using the PDF Merchant, which as I understand it, encrypts a unique version for each buyer. If someone does redistribute it with unlock keys or decrypted, you can track it down to the original buyer who pirated it. So even if encryption is weak, it is a fairly good deterrent. If people want your content, they’ll find a way to pirate it, you can’t stop them, but you can delay them.

BTW Revtim, the issue is not the securing of the financial transaction, it is securing the content. I haven’t seen any adequate solutions to the content-security problem, but Acrobat is about as close as it comes, for now.