eBook stamping - Is it to good to be true?

[secretpoliceman]

I am loving e-Junkie which I am using to sell a book. I now want to sell an e-Book version of it too - I have tested it on e-Junkie and it seems to work well and I like the little stamp on each page.



In theory it sounds really great, the answer to all my problems - but is it too good to be true?



Does anyone have any feedback they could share with me?



Thanks in advance.



www.secretpolicemanbook.com

[secretpoliceman]

By the way. I did have one problem though when I did a test. I found that if you clicked to download the book immediately after purchasing it, the stamp was not put on to the pdf file. I contacted e-junkie support and they replied as follows:



"If you clicked on the download link real quickly after the free checkout then it is possible that the system did not have time to stamp the document. It takes a few seconds after we get notified about a completed sale before the file is stamped. With a regular order this time is taken up in the time between when we get notified and when the buyer has access to the link."



I've now added the following to the standard email message:



"Thank you for purchasing my eBook.

To ensure that you receive it correctly, please wait 5 minutes before clicking the download link above."



Has anyone else had this problem? How many seconds/minutes should we ask people to wait before they download the e-book?

[laurab]

I don't think I would put a message like that. Any obstacle you put in the way of the buyer's convenience creates a greater chance that they won't be completely happy with their purchasing experience. I think I would just give them a couple quick paragraphs to read before they click the download link - make it something interesting or beneficial. The few seconds will pass as they're reading, and they won't have to be asked to wait.

[E-junkie_Guru]

As hundreds of merchants have started using our PDF Stamping feature, we have found a few rare cases where extremely large PDFs may take an unusually long time to finish stamping. We are working on solutions to handle this rare circumstance, but meanwhile, we can suggest a workaround.



If you test the PDF Stamping feature and determine that could be a problem for your particular file, you can "stall" the buyer long enough to complete the stamping. Go into your Seller Admin > Account Preferences and enter a Common Thank-you Page URL for a page on your site. On that page, you should instruct buyers to watch their email for a link to their download page. Then, by the time the buyer receives a thank-you email with the link to their E-junkie-generated thank-you/download page, the stamping should be completed.

[secretpoliceman]

Thank you both for your feedback!

My PDF WAS extremely large, because it contains many photos. I have now optimized the photos and thereby substantially reduced the filesize of the PDF, so going by Tyson's explanation, that should reduce the stamping time.



Tyson, when you say "extremely large PDFs may take an unusually long time to finish stamping" - are you referring to the filesize or to the number of pages?

(Mine has 310 pages)

[E-junkie_Ninja]

By large PDF's we are referring to the file size. It could be a small number of complex pages, or a large number of pages in general.

[sgt_bilko]

I would really like to dump ClickBank and use the e-junkie cart system for my sales, but when I tried to set this up I was able to access the non stamped file every time, which is a deal breaker for me.



From what I am seeing it is taking around a minute after clicking the buy button before the PDF stamped version of my ebook is ready. With ClickBank that has always worked except for a brief period recently and I sent in information about that to e-junkie but never heard back. Knowing that we can create a common thank you page suggesting users wait for their email with the download link would it be impossible for e-junkie to program it so that the email isn't sent until the stamp is confirmed? In theory that should solve the problem.

[secretpoliceman]

I would like to hear from e-Junkie what constitutes a "large file size".



My original document was 200Mb!!!!! I know, I know, ridiculously large and I am very embarrassed to reveal that I made such a dumb faux-pas. The book contains over 100 photographs and I had used the PDF that had been used to create the printed version of the book so each image was over 300dpi. I have now amended the pdf so that all the photos are at 96dpi and the file size has now been reduced by 90% and is now 20Mb.



So, e-Junkie, is this still a "large file size"? If so, how far should I further reduce it?



Thanks.

[sgt_bilko]

My book is 328 pages and I haven't counted the number of images, but at a guess it's probably around the same number. I settled on 150 dpi (technically that should be ppi but I digress) and my book weighs in at a shade under 50MB. I chose 150dpi because it allows users to increase the size of the text and images if they need to without problems. I would guess that 96 dpi is not too bad a solution but my book is about photography so I had to allow for that, since viewers may want to see bigger versions of the images.



FWIW, my book is clearly quite large, but I have purchased and downloaded bigger books through e-junkie.

[sgt_bilko]

Out of curiosity I just did another test trial for the download and surprise surprise, it didn't work again. This is the first time I have tried in a while and the system has failed. It took around 90 seconds before the download link was made available followed immediately by 4 emails a couple seconds later, one of which was the failed server notification message.



This is happening far too often now...

[E-junkie_Guru]

@SecretPoliceMan:

If you can make a test purchase of your product using Free Checkout and download the file immediately following checkout and find it stamped, then you should be fine.



@Ashley:

With all the problems you've been having with Stamping your file, it sounds like your PDF is simply far too large and/or complex for the stamper to handle effectively, to the point where it doesn't merely take an unusually long time to stamp but occasionally bogs down completely and gives up, resulting in the failure notices you occasionally see. Discussing the matter with Development, they really hadn't anticipated that anyone would try to sell a PDF eBook that huge as a download, so your file was apparently the first trial of the Stamper on that scale.



I presume you've performed a thorough Optimization to get the PDF compressed and flattened as small as possible? Are you embedding the photos as compressed JPEGs (rather than, say, lossless TIFFs)? Computers typically render monitor displays at 96ppi (which is how SecretPoliceMan arrived at that figure), so there's really no need to make the entire PDF any higher-res than that.



If you need to provide higher-res examples of the photos themselves for close examination at high zoom levels, an idea just occurred to me: make the photos in your actual eBook low-res, and provide a link in your PDF (maybe make the image itself clickable as a link) to bring up a higher-res version of each photo in the buyer's browser.

[sgt_bilko]

There is nothing complicated as such about the PDF. It is all flattened with zero password or restrictions at my end. The command to block copying only happens with the e-junkie PDF stamp. The source images are all optimised jpegs, though not optimised for web, because I wanted to make sure they could be enlarged a little without turning to mush. There is actually a command inside Apple Pages to optimise all images further before exporting to PDF but when I tried that the quality seriously suffered.



I can look at ways today of trying to reduce the image file sizes, however, I am confused, because the stamping feature was working fine for about 6 weeks without a single failure. Then when I tried to set up the e-junkie cart it failed every time. Now it's suddenly happening more frequently through ClickBank as well. Sales have been dead for the last couple of weeks after making some changes to my sales page, so I am going back to the way it was before. This was the first test I have tried a test in that time.

[sgt_bilko]

OK, I've just managed to decrease the overall size of the file by almost 50%. The images are a little less detailed than before as I expected but not totally horrible for the intended online viewing. The time for the stamping process has come down to around 40 seconds now and the stamp did work this time. I'll test it a couple more times over the next day to see if it continues to be reliable.



On a side note I'll be very happy if this has done the trick and I am able to switch fully from ClickBank to the e-junkie cart system.

[bayareacarguy]

Are files supposed to be stamped when I send out a free copy? Mine aren't, which, if they are to be stamped, means I need to deal with the delay issue.

[sgt_bilko]

I believe that no stamp is included when you send out a free copy. The trick is to temporarily make the price zero and then run through the checkout process but include the intended name and email of the who you want to receive the file.



They will then receive a download link to a stamped PDF and you can immediately put the price back to normal. Assuming your pdf isn't huge the stamping should be finished by the time they receive the notification for download.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Correct, free links issued via "Send free download link", or by sending out mass Updates via email, cannot be stamped. Only links issued as a result of an actual checkout (including E-junkie Free Checkout) can apply the stamp.



We can recommend a safer alternative to temporarily changing the product's actual price to 0.00. Instead, go to Seller Admin > Cart Discounts and create a secret Discount Code that takes 100% off the Item Total of any order. Then when you want to issue a free link, just add that item to a cart, apply your secret freebie discount code in the cart, and then proceed to Free Checkout where you would provide the intended recipient's name and email.