Greetings,

I'm in the process of developing my first membership site which will have online e-books available to members only. I plan to sell subscriptions to individuals who'd access via username/password and to groups (site/institutional licensing) who'd get access based on IP address (or some other system).

My current plan is to use .htaccess and IP addresses for controlling access to site license users (to avoid them needing to use usernames/passwords). For individual subscribers, I'm looking at installing aMember.

I'm interested in hearing from others who have implemented similar websites. What are the limitations to the plan I've described? Are there better solutions out there? Is there a way to setup site license access to a group that has a dynamic IP address but wouldn't require username/password? Any comments/insight would be welcome.

Andrew

Aschecht,

I might be able to help you out on this, EC Suite specializes in subscription/rebilling business models.

One problem that comes to mind right off the bat though is how easy it is to copy ebooks. I imagine most people wouldn't subscribe past the first month as they can just download all the content and cancel.

In media this can be prevented by DRM, and software by stuff like http://www.ecsuite.com/securedapp.php. But a pdf or any other kind of text document would be more vulnerable, the only protection I can think of would be to place a limit on the number of downloads a customer can do per day, if you do that make sure it's clear to the customer before they pay or you're likely to end up with a lot of disgruntled people.

If you have just a few ebooks you want to sell you might do better selling them individually as a download to own business model. If you have a large database with dozens or hundreds of ebooks the subscription model would be more viable. Your customers would be less likely just to download it all in one sitting and would find it useful over time.

With a download to own model you could try a download manager. They can work in a few different ways, the one my company provides to our payment processing clients would work like this though: A customer purchases the ebook and are given a link on there receipt page to the file download, it's a dynamic URL only accessible to the purchasers IP. The customer also would be given either a link to this URL in the confirmation email they receive, or we could actually embed the download manager into the email itself. No username/password required.

Russell,

Thanks for sharing this. I'll check out the EC Suite. I don't know if it would apply to me as my e-books are not downloadable (they're web-based in HTML). I'll be selling access to the online content.

Andrew