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[nycphp-talk] neeed help

David Krings ramons at gmx.net
Thu Sep 6 07:00:57 EDT 2007


birgunj birgunj wrote:
> Dear All,
>  
> i need help in the following thing.
>  
> 1. i am uploading ebooks on my website. i want to restrict user from 
> downloading or printing the book.user should only read the document but 
> cant not save or download or printing.
> how do we do  this ?
>  
> 2.if any book have four author.one author text box ,i display but i want 
> to display more if neccessary by clicking add author more.
>  
> or
> how to add more choices by press CLTRL.
>  
> please help me its very urgent. i am very tense about this.
>  
> thanks to all in advance
>  
> humayoo

If you do not want anyone to download or print the ebook you may need to 
make it into a streaming video and even then it may not be that tricky 
(just because I don't know how doesn't mean it is impossible).
We had this discussion here some days ago and you are basically out of 
luck. In order for a user to read the ebook they have to download it to 
their PC to be displayed in a browser. This is how WWW works. And once 
it is displayed in the browser you may have some control over the 
context menu, but I doubt you can manage the browser's main menues. And 
that is where the Print command is located. Also, if the users have some 
clue as to how WWW works, they will locate the downloaded ebook in the 
browser cache folder. Although, there are some ways to force the browser 
  not to cache the page contents. But then, how do you implement the 
ebook in a page anyway? Do you have something that obfuscates the 
original location on the server? Otherwise the user just needs to look 
at the page source and go directly to the URL of the ebook - and then, 
voila, no code involved that could control caching.
I could go on and on, but you really try to solve a marketing or 
management problem by wildly throwing technology at it. That approach is 
destined to fail!
Here is my proposal that from my own experience works much better:
a) price your offering so that there is no point in breaking the law
b) have your offering to be of such a high quality in content and 
delivery that users do want to pay you
c) add some other form of authentication to your site so that one has to 
login first or do something special that will make it more difficult for 
non-registered users to get the content

And if a), b), and c) are not an option, don't put it on the web. Put a 
request form up and mail CDs that are fully DRM enabled and 
self-destruct upon first use. Talk to Microsoft about this, they are 
experts in this asanine behavior.

For number 2: get a book about HTML and PHP and create some forms with 
code that first asks for the number of authors and then provides a form 
that as sufficient author entry fields.
Or get a book about ECMAScript and do some of this more fancy stuff 
where you process the click of a "More..." button on the client side. I 
am sure there are some on this list who could help you, but since this 
is a PHP list and we do server side scripting you are in the wrong 
concert here.


David



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