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Best Method of Distributing a Journal/Magazine PDF on CD

Forum Index > General Acrobat Topics > Best Method of Distributing a Journal/Magazine PDF on CD
2007-07-20 13:15:44
DanielHochman
Registered: Dec 20 2007
Posts: 20

Hi,
 
I'm working on a project for a non-profit that publishes a 125-page journal twice a year. They want to sell their whole collection of journals on CD. They currently have about 50 issues which I’m in the process of scanning and running OCR on.
I am trying to get advice as to the best method of putting these on CD and selling them.
 
The requirements in short are:
-Search capabilities throughout all 50 issues preferably with the ability to search only specific journals (years 1990 to 1995 for example)- This needs to be as simple for the user as possible
 
-Some sort of protection so one buyer can't simply send the PDF(s) around to all his/her friends. But at the same time we don't want it to be a difficult process in order to read them.
 
Is it feasible to put aprox 6,500 pages into one nicely indexed PDF to make the search simple or will that freeze people's systems up?
 
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
Daniel

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 8, Windows
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2007-07-23 07:49:39
#1
DuffJohnson
Expert
Registered: May 30 2006
Posts: 96
For your search needs, you'll be using Acrobat Search - see the Catalog function in Adobe Acrobat Professional for more information.

As for the "protection" to which you refer... the short answer is that there's no real protection for this sort of application that is worth the hassle/cost etc. of implementation. You can, however, get creative with "hiding" the PDFs on the disc using randomized file-names, but that's not actual security.

Bottom line: People who want to rip you off will do so no matter what. The real-world costs of attempting to control for this very unlikely scenario are way larger than you'd prefer to imagine.

We've built over 200 such discs in 11 years for some fairly high-profile commercial publications. Our clients live without DRM because it imposes real, long-term costs (especially in terms of support) that no publisher I've met really wants.

As for placing 6,500 pages on a disc - that shouldn't be a problem. If they are all full-color you'll likely need a DVD instead of a CD, but that's mostly a question of your tolerance for the effects of lower resolution and compression.

Duff Johnson
w - http://www.duff-johnson.com
t - http://www.twitter.com/duffjohnson

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2007-07-23 08:14:17
#2
DanielHochman
Registered: Dec 20 2007
Posts: 20
Thanks so much for your response. This site is awesome!

I have a few questions on what you said.
I know that the site vault.com(http://vault.com/store/store_home.jsp) sells their great guides in "Encrypted PDF" format. I downloaded a few and they go thru something called "Adobe Digital Editions" it looks like a sleek program which didn't seem too expensive or complicated- what do you think of it and is it possible to integrate that with a CD? Also, I saw a website (I can't find it now), that charged a pretty low price to have people "activate" the PDF through their site before it would work.

I'm not trying to protect against people who are very tech savvy. Rather I want to prevent people who know how to open My Computer, copy the PDF over to their HD and send it around to friends.
The idea of hiding it somewhere on the CD (perhaps with a non-PDF extension-if possible) would be a great solution. Is there somewhere I can learn how to do that?

In regards to the 6,500 page PDF my concern wasn't the capacity of the CD, but it was having such a large PDF which might freeze or work slowly. Is it a problem to have that many pages (greyscale 1540 X 2448 300dpi) in one PDF?
If I have to split up the PDFs then I had the problem of people searching across the different PDFs.

Thanks again for your help!

-Daniel
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