Ask HN: How to sell eBooks etc without the hassle?

9 points·rmc··6 comments

I have some ideas for some side businesses selling ebooks, clip art collections, that sort of things. I'm a web developer, but I don't want to write all the payments handling, sending files stuff myself. Can the HN community recommend any site that current does that? I'd like to be able to send them a file of my finished product and have some way to redirect the users to that site to buy stuff.

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I think you would find Scribd really useful:

http://support.scribd.com/entries/96701-selling-documents-on...

Also, Amazon makes it easy for publishers to sell e-books through their Kindle store:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_n...

(Once you publish on Kindle, you automatically get onto Stanza, Mobipocket and some other distribution channels too).

For clip art, I highly recommend IStock:

http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php

Clickbank does exactly that, but their fees are pretty high.

A few years ago, I wrote a custom script for ebooks that takes a PDF and watermarks every page with the buyer's Paypal email address after purchase, and offers email and download delivery options.

e-junkie.com is pretty much made for this use case. Back when my #1 problem was taking Paypal and immediately delivering license keys, they made my day.

Lulu.com and CreateSpace.com are both good for this.

could just set up a simple front end w/ shopfiy or something similar. i think they have support for digital goods.

Shopify + Fetch (http://fetchapp.com/) seems like a decent combination for selling digital goods. Fetch provides file hosting and download services and integrates with Shopify as well as other services. I believe it helps manage updates to your files too, eg. with an option to send out re-download notices to existing customers when you update a file.

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