How do you guard against piracy?
In today's digital age, eliminating piracy 100% is near impossible. Even a DRM-ed Kindle ebook can be pirated by removing the DRM in the span of minutes.
That being said, we take piracy extremely seriously. Here are the steps we currently take to minimize the chance of your book getting pirated:
- All your book files are stored securely on the cloud, behind a firewall. We use Amazon Web Services - the same infrastructure Amazon itself uses to store its ebooks.
- Before a reader can download your book, they must register an account with us and confirm their email
- Before a reader can download your book, they must authenticate their Goodreads or Amazon account. This is a requirement for readers we find for you, but you can turn this requirement off for readers you invite yourself.
- Before a reader can download your book, they must agree to terms stating that they will not share the review copy with anyone else
- If a reader decides to directly download, their download link expires in 5 minutes, which pretty much eliminates the possibility of link sharing
- We track the number of times a reader downloads your ebook and get automatically alerted about any suspicious activity
- Any reader who provably violates the above is banned from our platform
Furthermore, you can opt in to having readers request your ARC as opposed to immediately download it. When a reader requests your ARC, you receive details about the reader (see below). Then you have the final say on whether they can get your ARC or not.
We are also currently developing even more anti-piracy features, which existing customers will get for free:
- Supporting protected ePub formats
- Giving book owners the ability to set an auto-expiration date on their manuscripts
- Adding watermarks
We are in this for the long-term and building trust with our authors and readers is very important to us, both personally and financially.