Viral marketing and audio...

I have an ebook which would be perfect for viral marketing.  The book has some audios, and the plan is to make one part of the book available before purchase,
which would contain one audio file. (approx 1MB)
The audio files in the rest of the book would be around 10MB's.

What would be the best way to do this?  my thought was to have a link in the book (the section that has to be purchased) to a download page, where to customer could either listen to the audio while online, or download to their machine.
I was thinking to maybe do the  same with the trial part. Or, is 1MB a small file for folks to email each other?
Should I just keep the audio tohether with the book for easy listening?

My aim is to make it easy to send, and easy to listen to.

If I have a download page for the audios, how do I protect it?  Passwords?   I'm considering getting the hprlock (sp?)
mentioned on this forum.

Also, I have already tested PayPal, and the "return to merchant" button is not prominent enough.  What would you recommend as a service for the download aspect?  Sth with expiring links?  Or do I not need that with Active, since the book will need a password to unlock?

TIA,
Evita

I'm just completing an ebook with over 90 minutes of audio and it is 30MB in size. It has a flash opening and I'm using hyprlock to allow a free preview.

I'm not too worried about download size because a 2006 study shows that highspeed usage is now at 56% http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/09/jd_power_high_speed.html  So, I am including all the audio files with the book and providing a cd option (with shipping/handling) to dialup users.

I have a steep purchase price and want to keep people from sharing the audio, so I don't allow it as a separate download.

A solution you may consider is to stream the audio from your site. I chose not to do this because our ebook will have a long shelf life and I don't want to be responsible for maintaining a site years from now if we move on to another project.

Not sure which download page you want to protect, but there are many ways to do that. I fyou are protecting the ebook download, I'm not sure what the point would be if you want it to be viral.

If you are talking about the audio, you can make it a hidden web page and put the link in the restricted area of the book. Be aware of the fact that once the audio is downloaded to a computer and not wrapped in a hyperlock envelope it will be easily shared.

Put a page in your book that allows people to "send a copy to a friend" and code an embedded email that sends the book's download link to other people who's email address has been entered - also have option of copy/paste of link so it can be easily copied into any email so they don't have to look up addresses.

If you have download restrictions from your host, check out a service like box.net to host your file. They allow password protection and unlimited downloads for about $8.00/month.

There are a lot of options to explore, and I'm only sharing my opinion as to what works best for my situation.

Hope it helps.

Mark

There is no definitive protection for audio/video files using either Activ E-Book, HYPrLock or any other delivery system. Your "protection" with these products only apply to HTM/HTML web page files.

Activ E-Book encrypts and decrypts HTM/HTML files as required but any other file ( audio, video, graphic, flash, exe program ) etc. is visible in a special "Temp" directory and they can be copied by any savvy customer.

There is no protection available anywhere for these types of files. Even "Steaming" is not much protection because there are 3rd party programs that can record "Streaming" audio or video.

If you want to distribute an eBook that contains audio files and you want to prevent customers from pirating your material, there is really only one way that will work effectively. You must make sure that the audio files have no real value without the HTM/HTML content and structure.

How do you do this? Always make sure the audio content supplements the HTML content and has little value by itself. You must make sure that your customers need the HTM/HTML content to define or explain the audio content. For example one thing you should not do is distribute an eBook that contains HTML links for a list of songs. Pirates could just "steal" the songs - they don't need the HTML links to listen to a song.

When you are designing your eBook the first thing you must realize is that all of your content ( other than HTM/HTML web pages ) can be accessed and copied by anyone. If you start from this premiss, then you can design your eBook so that it would be irrelevant if someone did "steal" your supplemental material. That doesn't mean that the audio content can't be the greatest part of the eBook, it just means that the audio content must lose most of it's value without the HTML content.