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KB0038: Does Jutoh support encryption/copy protection/DRM?

Jutoh does not add any encryption for Digital Rights Management. By its nature, DRM has to be integrated with the distribution and sale of a book and therefore must be performed by the publishing system,for example the Amazon Kindle publishing site, Apple Books via iTunes, or Smashwords. None of these book submission systems can take an encrypted book from the user, so encryption in Jutoh would be of little use. Encryption should only be a concern if you intend to distribute the book yourself. In that case,you can use a service such as www.e-junkie.com or www.payloadz.com that can serve up a link to the ebook file after payment, from its own servers, so that the book is not freely available.

Whether a book is protected from clipboard copying is down to the reader software - there's nothing in the generated ebook files that can determine this.

In general I advise authors to stop worrying about encryption/DRM and simply add a request in their book for the reader to not distribute the book. This will discourage a good proportion of people from breaking the law. But a little piracy is good for publicity anyway. Note also that many readers hate DRM since it prevents them from reading the book that they bought on different readers. So you can make a lack of DRM into a selling point.

Another thing you can do, if selling books on your own site, is to add a keyword to one or more pages of your book, such as %CUSTOMERNAME%, and replace that keyword with customer information before copying the book to a download location. If serving Epub files, you can unzip the file, replace the keyword, and zip the file up again. If serving a Kindle file, you will need to use an Epub version of the book, and have a copy of Kindlegen on the server to create the .mobi file before copying it to the download location. If the book is large, this could take a noticeable time to do.

Although a pirate could still edit this information out of the book, it may provide some disincentive for the average customer from redistributing the book.

Normally, you can get a 70% royalty from Amazon, so unless your tax situation is complex or you can't access KDP, you may be better letting Amazon handle the book distribution, and adding a link from your web site. Likewise, you can use distributors such as Draft2Digital to target non-Amazon sites, but Amazon has the best discoverability and is by far the biggest ebook seller.


Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0037: Why does ODT import ignore some images? | Next: KB0039: Does Jutoh support justification?