One of the greatest successes of the Internet has been how it has liberated authors to become the publishers of their own work through the use of digital e-books (a.k.a. EBook, electronic books). The rise of e-books looks like it shall continue to rise as an increasing amount of hardware technology is released that can support the viewing of e-books (ebook readers, smart phones). On the publishing side, an industry has developed to provide ways to publish your book to the net. This article will focus on the three options available for publishing your ebook.

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

Third 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 shopping cart and payment processing interface with Paypal/etc. is completely taken care of by the vendor. You have little or no control over the marketing of your product on their site (how the product looks/branding/editing of product text) or on capturing purchaser's details.

When a book is purchased from the vendor's site, the security of the digital download (which is normally a download link emailed to the purchaser) is managed by the vendor. This involves controlling if the download link for the book has a time limit (a time span for how long the link is valid) or if there are restrictions on the number of downloads attempts that can be made using the URL (to protect it from multiple downloads).

On the downside, you cannot build up a membership listing of purchasers so you miss out on potential loyalty purchases. This could affect you if you intend publishing several eBooks and wish to build upon a customer base of previous customers.

Making Downloads Available In Password Protected Public Folders

This is an old approach to distributing eBooks whereby you make a public folder on your web server and configure it to be password protected. When a customer purchases a book via your site you send them details of the password and URL/folder for the download.

On the upside, there is no cost involved (except your time) but you still need some form of shopping cart system to handle the purchase.

But a major setback to this technique is the weak security of freely distributing the password and URL with people who could then freely redistribute the details to others that could download the e-book.

Digital Download Management 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).

As the author has full control of the software, they also can compile a mailing list of previous purchasers and can configure how secure the download links are/how long these links are to be available for.

After the software cost, the only other cost is the commission to the credit card processor and the sole operational overhead is the application set-up and handling refunds.

In conclusion: Each of the options have benefits and constraints which specific types of authors will be drawn to/put off by. If you plan to sell multiple eBooks then choosing a Sales Management and Distribution Tool is the best option for retaining control over your book's marketing and mailing lists. If you only have one eBook to sell, don't wish to capture purchasers in a mailing list and want zero involvement in the set-up, marketing and sales of your eBook then using one of the many online vendors should work well for you.