My question is about enabling printing of my ebook. I only want customers to be able to print 1 page, not the whole e-book.
My e-book is about building golf clubs. I do not want people to be able to copy any of my material. However, I do need my customers to be able to print charts used for building of the clubs.
It is difficult to prevent someone from printing the material in your e-book. The problem is if it can be selected on the screen it can also be copied and pasted into a word processor.
There are two alternatives--neither of which I personally like.
First, make the page a GIF file. That way the file is a graphic. Although it does not prevent the user from copying the graphic it does make it more awkward to use.
Second, if you have Acrobat you can create a PDF file that prevents the text from being selected. Of course there are ways around this too. For example, there are programs that will convert any PDF file into a text file. I cannot say for certain that they work with locked PDF files.
There is a third way, but it is pretty hokey. That is to use javascript to prevent the text from being selected. Although not difficult to get around it will slow down the casual user.
Thank you for your reply. I hadn't even thought of the options you gave me. However, they do seem very time comsuming (my Ebook is over 90 pages).
I have the active E-book Compiler. I know that I can disable print and copy. Which will help deter casual users from copying. Do you know if the javascript will work, if I disable the printing option on this book?
If Javascript will work, do you know where I can find code, to enable printing of a certain page or area of a page?
Can't really answer you question with any certainity because I've never used the disable feature. I'd suggest creating a two page ebook and test it out.
An alternative approach would be to turn off selection/printing for the entire book and create supplemental files that the user can download/print from the web site. The advantage to this approach is if you have updates for the printable material it can be done in one location.
If you like the last suggestion, I'd suggest that you consider providing a forum for the users of your ebook where they have the ability to share their experiences with others and for you to provide customer support. Things often look great on paper, but everyone has their own approach to learning and acquiring new material, which means there are always questions to answer.
You'll need to disable the printing and copying functions from the ebook, and add a print button to the page. Or all the pages you need to allow printing.
I'll paste in the <form> button method here, cause I just used it to answer another question on the forum:
<form> <input type="button" value="Print This Page" onClick="window.print()" /> </form>
You could also add the 'print();' function to an href (a text link) or image, if you liked, with an 'onclick=' parameter.
But that's it... disable the functions, add the print function back to the one page.
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