With the increasing popularity and proliferation of eBooks online, there has been a stream of different ways to distribute your eBook to the masses. This article shall detail the principal options available for distributing eBooks along with the pros and cons of each approach.

The three options each have security, control, and cost implications that will either suit, or not suit, each individual eBook author.

3rd Party Vendors

This is the most common scenario for selling e-books online and is a business model most people will be familiar with. The e-book author uploads their book to the vendor’s site who manages the sales, marketing and primary promotion of the book in return for a sales commission.

The vendor looks after processing payments and dealing with the credit card companies/Paypal. In general terms, the author is allowed to provide a book description or synopsis but they have no control over their book’s marketing on the vendor’s site so their book may appear on a page surrounded by competing advertisements or competing books.

When a book is purchased from the site, the vendors is responsible for controlling if the book’s download link has a time limit or if the number of downloads attempts is restricted (to protect it from being downloaded by several people).

One disadvantage of using a third party vendor is that the author cannot compile a membership listing of previous purchasers so they miss out on the potential of future loyalty purchases. This could affect publishers who intend releasing several books and wish to build upon a customer base of previous customers.

Provide Downloads Through Password Protected Folders

This old (rarely used) technique to distributing e-books entails creating a shared password protected folder on your server and copying your e-book to this folder (so it is available to the web). Once a customer purchases your book you simply send them the password and URL for the download.

On the up side, there is no cost involved in taking this approach but you will still need to use a shopping cart application to manage the purchase in the first place.

On the downside, the security is weak as the password can be shared with multiple people (so people could share the URL & password and download your eBook ad infinitum) and there is the overhead of administration (setting up passwords for each customer).

Sales Management and Distribution Tools

This is the independent way of publishing e-books that involves installing software on your own server to manage the shopping cart process, download link security, compiling mailing list information and communicating with purchasers (emailing them the secure links to the e-book download).

You have access to, and control over, the mailing lists of purchasers and you control the security of your products (how secure the download links are/how long these links are to be available for/etc.).

After the cost of the sales application, your only cost on each eBook sale is the commission to Paypal/whomever for the handling of the payment. The only operational overhead is the application setup and administration.

In summary: If you are an author that intends selling several e-books then choosing a Sales and Download Management Tool is the ideal option. If you have a single e-book for sale or don’t wish to capture purchasers in a mailing list then using a third party vendor is the simplest option for you.

Looking for a secure commission free way of selling ebooks online? Then read Alan’s review of DLGuard – a one-stop solution for selling digital downloads.