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25+ Most Amazing Websites to Download Free eBooks (2021)

February 16, 2021 by Arun 3 Comments

In this article, we will see 25+ websites to download free eBooks.

These could be used to simply READ eBooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR We can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain eBooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.

I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website. So, stay till the end of this video to find out some new websites along with a bonus website at the end.

If you want to “watch” this blog post in a video format, you can see the video below.

1. ebooklobby.com

ebooklobby.com has a humble collection with ebooks categorized into different types such as art, fashion, graphic design, photography, finance, biographies, computers, entertainment, and many others. They also have a section that shows Top 10 ebooks categorized into various sections.

2. bookspics.com

bookspics.com – This website claims to have 275 thousand + books available to download. They have a pretty good collection of books, except that they aren’t categorized for easy identification.

3. planetpublish.com

planetpublish.com – This is a pretty minimalistic website with a neat collection of classic books such as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc, all available in PDF format ready to download.

4. Librivox.org

Librivox is a website that offers a free collection of Public Domain Audiobooks. This will be loved by people who don’t have time to “read” books but can find time to listen to books through audiobooks. Simply click on their ‘catalog’ and find hundreds of audiobooks, ready to be downloaded, which can also be filtered either by Author, Title, Genre, or Language. A little word of caution here: although these audio books are claimed to be in the Public domain, they are so in the U.S.A. please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.

5. free-ebooks.net

Free ebooks dot net is a website that has a HUGE collection of books that are available to download in PDF, Kindle format, text or ePub formats. These downloads are available only after we register with them, which is FREE of course. Go ahead and check it out.

6. freetechbooks.com

This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet. All the books listed in this site are freely available, as they are hosted on websites that belong to the authors or the publishers. In other wordS, they don’t host the books but simply provide links to the books in PDF or HTML format available at the authors or the publishers websites.

7. freecomputerbooks.com

Everything on this website is 100% Free. This includes books, lecture notes, magazines, white papers, tutorials and much more.

FreeComputerBooks.com consists of a huge collection of Free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Books, which are well categorized by topics, with 13 top-level categories, and over 200 sub-categories. It has both pattern and keywords search engines for you to find the titles quickly.

The key highlights on this website are that most of the books are links to other ‘LIVE’ websites where the books don’t go out-dated as they are all maintained as current and latest by their respective owners.

The other thing is that they even have some books by OReilly publishers, some Mobile computing books where one can find great books on Android Development, iOS programming, etc. Go ahead and start learning coz your “imagination” is the only limit here!

8. gitbook.com

Now this one is my favorite. GitBook was created mid-2014 with the vision of creating a modern and simple solution to documentation, digital writing, and publishing. Since then, they’ve grown to help more than 250,000 people working together into writing 150,000 books served to 20M visitors every month.
To begin, just go to gitbook.com and click on the ‘Explore’ menu then choose a tag that interests you. For e.g. ‘Web development’ brings up these results. Let’s say we go ahead and choose the latest version of “Front-end Developer Handbook 2018” – as you can see these are updated just a few days ago! Let me show you a demo of how and what this book covers.

9. Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

An online repository of books maintained by a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, this is a plain vanilla HTML site but has a great collection of books and is quite organized when we consider the fact that it’s just maintained by 1 or 2 people! Just go ahead and navigate through the hyperlinks given on their homepage to browse through the site by titles, subjects, listings and more.

10. openlibrary.org

Open library is just what it says – an open library, that hosts a huge list of ebooks waiting to be read. It has all the classics and some contemporary books. You can use its search fields to search for books or authors. When ready to read, it has a great book design format that opens right on the screen where we can start reading right away.

11. Google Play books

Next in our list is a little different one. Google Play books. This has the option of either reading on our Android phones or directly on the web browser. I have provided a link to it in the show notes that takes you directly to the Top Free section where you can download hundreds and thousands of ebooks that are mostly short and crisp in their subjects.

12. knowfree.Tradepub.com

As the top destination for the latest research and publications, TradePub.com publishes curated resources on behalf of the world’s largest and most influential companies. The TradePub.com research library is #1 resource for professionals to access free research, white papers, reports, case studies, magazines, and eBooks. Professionals are eligible to sign up for a free TradePub.com Membership to enjoy unlimited access to the TradePub.com resource library including On-the-go access to all materials regardless of device or browser with unlimited access to the complete TradePub library.

13. Amazon Cheap Reads for Kindle

Now, this is not a famous website… wait, I am just kidding here. 🤣 Amazon, as you might not expect, has tons of FREE ebooks to be downloaded. It has a great list of books organized as per categories when you use this special link available in the show notes below. Want to read free romance novels, or mystery, thriller and suspense, or just a classic book or a science fiction, it’s all in here. Just go ahead and get your Kindle apps, if you don’t have a Kindle device or simply read them on your web browser by going to read.amazon.com.

14. feedbooks.com/ publicdomain

Feedbooks – The caption itself promises to provide 1000s of public domain books at the outset. With categories ranging from short stories, fantasy, romance, to the harvard classics shelf of fiction – there are two broad shelves where all these books are kept in – fiction and non-fiction. Ranging from Dante’s Divine comedy, the adventures of Sherlock holmes, Treasure island, Around the world in 80 days, and much more, you can find them all in here.

15. Goodreads

Goodreads – This is not an ebook download site per se but it has a curated list of information about books that are in the public domain. Now people who are into re-publishing public domain books with either an annotation, or illustration, or translation into Amazon’s KDP will find this TREASURE a HUGE help. This has books categorized into various shelves with some even tagged as ‘before 1923’, as you can see here on the screen.

16. ebooks.adelaide.edu.au

This is again a website funded and maintained by a university, The University of Adelaide in Australia. It has a decent collection of books categorized into all these subjects. Although the site design is not that intuitive or great, it does have some neat content and a collection of FREE ebooks worth checking out.

Anthropology
Archaeology
Art
Biography
Books
Economics
Exploration and travel
Fiction
Gastronomy
History
Law
Literature
Medicine
Myth and Fable
Philosophy
Politics
Psychology
Religion
Science

17. LoyalBooks.com

Now, this website is a feast for all readers. And that’s an understatement. It has a GREAT collection of books categorized into various topics, along with providing ebooks for download in various formats from kindle Mobi to pdf to an audiobook. Thus the options are plenty and no excuse for us NOT to read. This website seems to be dedicated to making all free books available to us through this enormous catalog of collections; no wonder it doesn’t surprise when we see that loyalbooks was known as ooksShouldBeFree.com earlier.

18. GRTBooks.com

If you are not just a reader of books but also a collector, this site has many surprises in it. Classics, I mean, age-old scripts are available in this site such as Upanishads, and other sacred texts that goes back to 200 BC and earlier. Works of Plato, Hippocrates, Sun-Tzu, Aristotle, Thiruvalluvar, and The Vedas, Ramayana can all be found in this remarkable HTML-only website. Go Indulge!

19. Wikisource

Wikisource – We all might have heard about Wikipedia, but there is another similar source for getting free books to read and that’s Wikisource. Captioned as ‘a free library that anyone can improve’, it’s another free source for people who are looking to publish public domain books into KDP as almost all the books given here are cited with their publishing year, and many can be found that are published in the 19th century.

20. Baen

http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012

Baen Books is now making available a number of its titles in electronic format, for FREE. They’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Bonus: Now here’s a bonus website: This page from getFreeEbooks has a compilation of many topic-wise ebooks for any kind of reader. https://www.getfreeebooks.com/category/top-compilations/

There are more websites that were worth a mention, but for which I wasn’t sure of the copyrights involved. Go ahead and check all of them in the show notes below.

More websites worth mentioning:

  1. http://www.freebookcentre.net
  2. http://www.freebookspot.com/Catalogue.aspx
  3. http://ebook3000.info/Default
  4. https://www.bookgoldmine.com
  5. https://bygosh.com
  6. https://manybooks.net/
  7. Kobo – free eBooks

As you can see, there is no shortage of websites that let you download and read books for free.

If not already done, make up your mind to start reading to become better in anything you are doing.

Readers are, definitely Leaders.

If not for others, this at least can help you “lead” a better life.

Filed Under: Listicles, Blog Posts Tagged With: guides

ProWritingAid Demo and Review (Video)

February 16, 2021 by Arun Leave a Comment

Introduction

Whether we are writing a novel, a blog, an essay, an email, a report, or anything else, words are the tools we use to get the ideas out of our head and into someone else’s.

So, in this process of passively communicating with other minds, it takes a great deal of cognitive power to edit and correct our own writings – often interfering with our creative flow and turning a blind eye to potential errors, mistakes, and painful sentence formations.

Clearly, a software can help in mitigating at least the majority of this pain.

ProWritingAid is one such software.




What’s in here

In this detailed article, we will see a complete demo of this software that is also a popular alternative to the Grammarly software. I have used both these tools, you would have even seen my Grammary review video here – and, towards the end of this blog post, you’ll also see WHY I have let go of my Grammarly premium account to expire due to some very important differences between Grammarly and ProWritingAid.

This could even help YOU with your decision on which software to use going forward, so make sure you read (or watch the entire video), till the end.

For all the visual peeps out there, watch this detailed post in a video format from this video here on my Tech Library TV YouTube Channel: (don’t forget to subscribe for more such videos and descriptive reviews in the future)

If you are in a hurry, simply use the Table of contents with timestamps given in the video notes section (if you are watching directly on YouTube) to quickly jump to those parts in the video.

Spoiler Alert

You’ll see that I am slowly moving away from Grammarly by the end of this article due to one very important reason, mentioned in the end of this post. Nevertheless, I am not against Grammarly but just found a better alternative.  Grammarly is still great and I am absolutely fine with its free version for using in my simple non-confidential articles.

The Core

From a high-level perspective, we have two ways to use ProWritingAid:

  • either we can use it within writing apps as an assisting tool, OR,
  • use its web editor online to directly upload your text.

We’ll see how to edit online using the web editor now!

Detailed Review

Let’s go ahead and create the account first – at the time of signing up, simply provide your best email address, choose a strong password, and select what type of writer you are, from the adjacent-given drop-down button.

prowritingaid signup button screenshot

And click the ‘Sign Up for free’ button.

Alternatively, you can also use these Social logins. Now, since I have already created an account, I am going to click on this login button directly. This takes me to the web editor.

ProwritingAid has improved a lot in the recent past – its editor was a simple one with robust features like this one, which was mostly reserved for the premium users but they now have an updated and new editor which we can view from these links.

Simply, click on the one that you want to use. This article explains the ‘New Editor‘ though.

Old Editor: https://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/Editor
New Editor: https://prowritingaid.com/en/Analysis/WebEditor/Go

As soon as we land on the new web editor, we see a lot of icons and a couple of options to choose how we want to start our editing process. Either upload your document in a word processor format or Plain Text Format.

You could also simply copy and paste your text into the web tool from anywhere.

From the horizontal action bar on the header, we have the menu, writing style selection, and language options. You could also upload your document to edit from its menu option.

Additionally, there is also a “Word Explorer” which is an excellent tool to spark some creativity with any word’s definition, synonym, examples, and more. This is quite useful for finding the right words and sometimes even breaking through our writer’s block. It contains a thesaurus, contextually related words, rhymes and examples from books and much more.

This is available from the menu drop-down.

Prowritingaid menu bar

When you login, you can also see a sample text with some errors.

There are a plenty of reports available to run on our write-up.

Note that, hitting on the ALT key also gives us with a set of keyboard shortcuts to access these different reports.

ProwritingAid keyboard shortcuts

Let’s now quickly go over what these different reports can offer us – remember we can run these reports for free (except for the plagiarism check, which needs credits to be purchased).

These reports are free only for the first 500 words at a time, so if you have a 1000 word write-up, you need to break your checks into two – with 500 words each.

This limit is removed if you choose to upgrade your license to premium version which is just 50$ per annum – quite cheaper compared to similar tools like Grammarly which costs close to $139.95 USD per annum.

You can even get a Lifetime Premium version of ProWritingAid for just $175 $399 (as of January 2021) – I recommend grabbing this lower price before ProWritingAid changes its pricing model because, at this price, it offers a great deal of editing assistance for any kind of writers.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid – a Comparison

Let’s now see a comparison of Grammarly and ProWritingAid software.

  • Both offer to edit anywhere we write – offline, or online – but only Grammarly offers their tool offline even in the free version whereas ProWritingAid’s free version is available only for the web – if we need it within Word or use it as a Desktop tool, we need to upgrade to the premium version.
  • I thought that at least a minimum integration could be given for free users by PWA, but only web editor is available. If the limited 500-word check free version was also made available as an add-in within Word – then that would have clearly won over other similar tools like Grammarly which offers a free office add-in, desktop standalone software, and also a browser extension.
  • Overall, the threshold cap for the free version is kept on the number of words that we can edit at a time within ProWritingAid – only on the first 500 words at a time – otherwise almost all the checks and features are available on the online tool – on the other hand, Grammarly doesn’t limit on the words we check but blocks out majority of the features on the free version.
  • Cost-wise, the PWA is certainly cheaper compared to Grammarly at its current pricing model – clearly setting it apart from its competition – with no reason not to buy it.
  • Plagiarism checks: The downside with PWA, in my humble opinion, is that their paid version gives only 50 plagiarism checks per year. Which is really less, if you ask me, whereas no such limits exist with the paid version of Grammarly. Although not everyone would want to check on Plagiarism, it doesn’t make sense to limit its check, is what I feel. At least for the paid users, this check must be made unlimited.
  • Privacy: Next, let’s talk about content privacy. Grammarly collects user content as you can clearly see from their terms of use here (https://www.grammarly.com/privacy-policy#what-information-does-grammarly-collect-about-me) whereas ProWritingAid doesn’t collect any of our work as mentioned from their FAQ section seen on the screen (https://prowritingaid.com/en/App/FAQ/#security).
    • This factor was a clear win or lose for me – I never want my work to be stored or collected by anyone for that matter, without really knowing or controlling how this will be used further in the future. This is the main reason why I have let my premium version of Grammarly expire without renewing its license.
  • Finally, the contextual spelling errors that are not exactly errors but correct words misplaced in the sentence – these mistakes are beyond ANY tool’s scope to catch, and thus only a human editing can solve.
  • If you liked this review, please also feel free to check out SoftwareHow’s review on their website.

===============================

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter what type of user you are – be it student, blogger, author; ProWritingAid will have you covered by helping you improve your writing and getting your ideas across more clearly.

If you liked the review, please get your lifetime premium version at just a one-time fee by clicking here: this is an affiliate link, which means, I get a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Get ProWritingAid now !!

Filed Under: Reviews, Blog Posts, Technology Tips Tagged With: guides

How to Protect Online Courses (Video)

February 12, 2021 by Arun Leave a Comment

Let’s say you create online courses and sell them as part of your business. You might be facing two different kinds of people.

  • Your genuine paying students, and
  • Content pirates.

In this detailed blog post, we’ll see a few steps on tightening the security of your online video course content that you may have hosted using course platforms such as Thinkific, Teachable, or Kajabi.

Or it could be even directly hosted on your Wistia account which you would embed into your WordPress websites.

Let’s get started.

If you prefer not to read, but “watch” this guide in the form of a video, here’s a playlist with 3 videos that takes overall ~18 minutes approximately to fully watch.

Subscribe to Tech Library TV  

We have 3 parts to this video series and in the 1st part we’ll see:

  1. Steps to secure videos hosted directly on Wistia, and How to protect videos within your WordPress dashboard using plugins,
  2. and in the 2nd part, we’ll explore options we have to secure videos hosted on Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi course platforms.
  3. and in the last part, we’ll go over some best practices to follow, right at the time of creating video content itself. We’ll also talk about some limitations about this approach, and when to stop worrying about this entire problem. On the other hand, in this part we’ll also see some references and links to tools to complex procedures like creating .bif files, to protect your videos from being downloaded.

Alright, so here’s how to tighten the security around your videos hosted directly on Wistia.

Wistia has its Account, Projects, and then the course videos within the projects.

First, at the account level – let’s verify the embeddable options across domains. To check that setting, go to Account – Settings – Account, then scroll down to check the Domain Restriction settings. If you disable this, you can control on which domains the video can be embedded.

Next, after you are inside your Wistia dashboard, click on your Project.

By default, your project will be unlocked. Which means, anyone with that link can access your videos within that project.

You can also see that it’s not locked by seeing this icon.

Click on this padlock icon to bring up the Privacy & Sharing settings popup.

And toggle this button to lock it.

You can also get to this by clicking on this ‘Set Privacy & Sharing’ link.

This is a project level setting. Since all your course videos may stay inside your project, it’s important to provide this project-level security before protecting your individual videos.

Next, get into your individual videos where we can add a couple more security settings to them.

  1. Sharing option settings: go to customize, Share, uncheck all the sharing options, to remove the embed option for end users altogether. Or better, turn the ‘Sharing’ off.

Keep in mind, you can still embed on your own website by clicking on this Embed & Share button.

2. Password settings: within the same customize options menu, choose Password and provide a password to view the video. Although, it may annoy your users experience with this setting, it definitely helps limit the spread of your videos disallowing users to watch your content until a password is entered which you can share in an email with your student as soon as your course is purchased. A nominal feature, but it helps a step further in protecting content if you are keen about it.

So, those were the extra two settings to limit abusing the videos within Wistia account.

The assumption here is that since we are using Wistia directly to host our video content, we will be using another destination such as our WordPress website to embed our Wistia videos.

So, let’s also see how to secure our landing pages in our WordPress website, where Wistia videos are embedded. Basically, one can get to the embed URLs hashed id by visiting a website’s source code by either inspecting element or going through the Developer Tools.

Watch these videos on how people could get to the embedded videos:

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In this series, we’ll see how one can get to embedded videos using Developer Tools in Google Chrome browser. This playlist also shows how to download Wistia Videos, how to download Vimeo videos, and finally how to download Facebook videos. These are all done directly in the browser on a PC (or Mac) and doesn’t need any external or 3rd party software.

Don’t miss to check them out so you are aware on how anyone could get access to your video content.

Just remember that someone without the login credentials to your paid course, cannot access your paid content – unless you have made the content freely available on the internet.

Although I have clearly mentioned in my videos to respect copyright policies, and not to misuse it for illegal gains, I still had to create this video series to combat this problem – not fully, but at least to the best extent possible.

Here are a few wordpress plugins that can help us block such browser level access to the iframe or embed URLs, disable right click options, disable inspecting element options, etc.

Disable Right Click For WP
Developer Tools Blocker

If you want to learn how to protect with similar settings but inside a Blogger blog, then check my article here which talks about how to disable text selection, disable right clicking on the page, disable viewing page source, and disabling dev tools – you can also get an all-in-one code block from this page here:

How to Secure Your Content – in Blogger and WordPress

As a bonus, here’s a tool you might want to consider: https://www.vdocipher.com/

it’s called VDOCipher – which offers more solid protection. For beginners it’s a bit pricey though, in my opinion . And I have not used this personally but their offerings and overall reviews sounds promising. Do give that a try to protect your course videos.

Before I move on, I just wanted to highlight an important point:

I have come across some crazy loopholes in websites and blogs’ sitemap to be specific, through which lead magnets, and digital downloads could be easily downloaded ALL without the knowledge of the website owners, without paying, without signing up to mailing list or anything.

I reached out to MANY bloggers in the last few years, helped them and showed the loophole in their websites (I still do) and how they should protect themselves from content pirates. I have even written a book about it some 4 years ago – which is still valid to this day.

FWIW, I also wrote a post on Quora on how to spot spam websites.

https://www.quora.com/Is-a-digital-profit-course-fake-or-a-scam/answer/Arun-Sarathy-5

Why am I saying this now: just to tell you that I take this seriously, and that’s why I had to share this information on safeguarding the hard work by creators like you.

Next, we’ll discuss some possible methods to make the illegal accessing tough enough on popular online course platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Kajabi.

What’s common in all of them? – they all use Wistia as we can see from their respective help and support articles.

Teachable - https://support.teachable.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051987952
Thinkific - https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030741413-Video-Library-Upload-and-Manage-Videos
Kajabi - https://help.kajabi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360051863654-Does-Kajabi-Host-My-Video-Content-

Let’s see what Teachable has to say about security.

Here they mention that even with these security precautions, it is impossible to completely stop content theft, sharing, and piracy.

Although with Teachable, there is no further option available to my knowledge, they do tell us that we can send a DMCA takedown notice if we believe that any content violates our Intellectual Property rights, and so they provide some guidance around how to do it.

This requires some work, but chances are more that it can positively work in your favor to takedown the pirated content. Sometimes it might feel like chasing two rabbits on a new moon night, but let’s not leave any stone unturned. So do your bit and submit the DMCA notice if you find your content stolen and sold on some other website.

Next, let’s see what does Thinkific has to say about limiting or discouraging content sharing: This article will cover what settings they have in place and some recommendations to prevent sharing. I have provided these links in the description below, so please do check them out.
https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030721673

But what if students share logins with their friends and thus cost you that missed customer value? Thinkific provides a way to combat that issue as well. These are quite task-bound, but if you are really keen in these security procedures then it’s time worth spending looking into these methods.
https://support.thinkific.com/hc/en-us/articles/360030736913-Can-I-prevent-students-from-sharing-logins-

A point to note here is that I am not being sponsored by any of these course platforms and these are all my independent tests that I am running and the experiments I am going through to see which course platform is more suitable for video security.

Lastly, speaking of Kajabi, it’s a beast and offers a ton of tools that are beyond what a normal online instructor needs. You get websites, payments system, products shop, email automation and so much more.

Coming to videos security, there aren’t great options available at the outset.

Although, their platform is quite robust with strong security around their login credentials and the entire workflow design around customer-student relationship and overall onboarding process, their video security is left with Wistia’s video hosting to take care of.

And I tested this by checking the available settings in my Kajabi Growth account. We do have the option to control the domain connected to our Kajabi account, something similar to what we saw within Wistia itself in the first part.

However, I didn’t find any access level settings that can be implemented for videos that we add directly to the Kajabi course pages. To summarize, to each his or her own.

In my tests, since Wistia is the common platform used as video hosting by these three course platforms (and also many other course platforms out there) – only Thinkific offers some granular-level details and options, as we saw earlier, when it comes to controlling and analyzing unauthorized downloading or sharing of video content we create. And we didn’t find anything close within Teachable and Kajabi.

Again, as I said, to each his own because some might like the different tools offered by Kajabi and some may love the look and feel that Teachable has, but if your only concern is around securing your video content within your online course modules – then Thinkific would be my choice.

Next, let’s talk about the mindset that might help, to have to face these situations. I have learned that from my mentors, and just wanted to share it with you here.

We all know that – there is no Good news or bad news but only the thinking makes it so. I have both good news and a bad news for you and it depends on which angle you see it from – So, I will leave the choice to you:

  • News # 1 – People will steal your content, and we cannot stop that completely. We can only appeal to their common sense, dignity, and self-respect by expressly forbidding the shop-lifting of your videos without permission, in your terms of use page, copyrights page and other legal-talk documents. The reason protection doesn’t work 100% is because, at a minimum, your end-user, THE VIEWER can use their phones to record their computer screen or use a screen recording software, or take screenshots, or any other tool to get the content – so it’s worth repeating here – that no protection setting is going to work 100%. Please remember that. As soon as we upload something to the internet, we must remember that if someone wants to get hold of the content, they will get to it somehow. That’s the big trade-off on the internet.
  • News # 2 – There is no way for anyone to gain access to your course without purchasing it from you. A vast majority of the People out there are decent and honorable, they are the ones who would love to learn from you, enrol into your courses as students and might as well have already paid you for what you have offered. My main aim to make this video series is to help educate creators and also as a reminder for myself, to safeguard our hard work to the best extent possible, and know when to stop obsessing over this – so as to have the right mindset when it comes to creating premium content to SERVE our audience and to SHARE OUR KNOWLEDGE with others. And THAT should be where our primary focus should be.

So please don’t worry and fret over the 100% content protection and that just makes us lose sleep over the actions of a few percentage of people, when there are millions of people who genuinely support and are eagerly waiting to learn from what you have to offer and teach. That’s the section of people, our supporters, fans, followers, tribes, on whom we want to focus more of our valuable time on.

However, just make sure you take care of the reasonable security settings we saw in these videso, so you would have at least taken a few steps to safeguard your creations and make it a little bit more harder for anyone to get indirect access who have not paid you.

But a point to reiterate here is that the course pages are never indexed by search engines. The content pages with videos are only ONLY available to your students who have enrolled AFTER paying you the course price you have set.

So, when we speak of providing value, that’s the mindset with which we are looking at this whole thing about online teaching. Providing value for money, regardless of the knowledge that we know someone somewhere is going to misuse our content.

Protecting your content with these techniques is similar to designing a Hurdles Race. Professional hackers can still surpass all these hurdles and will ultimately end up copying content from your websites.

Here are some best practices to always follow while creating content:

Watermark your videos with your logo, or show your face while talking and name on the screen. The name can stay for the entire duration of the video in a subtle way without disturbing the viewing experience. Add a visible link to your copyrights notice – so the possible future content pirates can at least see that warning on what they can expect if they choose to pirate your content.

Next, as we saw earlier, you could send a DMCA notice for taking the pirated content down.

Here’s a related great article from Thinkific that outlines 11 ways to protect your Intellectual Property in your Online Courses.
https://www.thinkific.com/blog/intellectual-property-online-courses/

I really liked the 10th and 11th points.

To quote from that blog post,

“…don’t hold back all of your knowledge and stop all of your millions of potential customers from hearing it, just so that a small handful of people can’t get it.”
“People can copy our words, our writing, our ideas and our services, but they can never BE us.”
“YOU are the biggest trademark of your IP, so although we need to keep half an eye open, don’t let the fear of your IP being copied be a barrier to you changing people’s lives.”

If you found some lines repetitive in this long and detailed guide post, especially about the creator’s mindset to upkeep, that’s intentional because it’s important and I wanted to purposely repeat so as to reinforce that.

To conclude, I highly recommend these resources which might help you.

  1. Please listen to this podcast episode as a reference where copyright infringement is discussed in detail with an attorney. It has rich content that discusses points such as “At what point your online content (such as a course) is copyrighted” and how to protect your online content with the digital millenium copyright act, and much more. https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/copyright-infringement-and-dmca/
  2. Also, watch this video message by Marisa Murgatroyd, where she beautifully delivers a message on this very topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4seBnQQMuQ
  3. If you want to hike it up a notch further, and go the legal way, here’s a video that gives some suggestions.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RowIl39S_-w
  4. I haven’t covered Vimeo settings in this guide. Check out this video that shows a setting for videos hosted on Vimeo:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zk3meOcV_k
  5. Finally, here’s a technical walkthrough of how to Protect Your WordPress Videos From Being Downloaded.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-tZhlYH8o

I wish you all success with your video courses.

Keep creating because your victory is just around the corner.

Filed Under: Blog Posts, Technology Tips Tagged With: guides, video

Solved: How to Create a Submenu in Authority Pro Theme

December 24, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

Authority Pro is one of the premium StudioPress themes and it’s secondary menu structure, by default, doesn’t allow creating sub-menus.

Not even after customizing our WordPress menu like this (pushed slightly to the right to create sub-menus):

Here’s how to fix this issue:

Go to your Theme Editor.

Click on Functions.php

Click inside the editor and search for ‘secondary_menu‘.

Within this code, ‘comment out’ the second line – as shown below.

	if ( 'secondary' === $args['theme_location'] ) {
		//$args['depth'] = 1;
	}

That’s it, click on ‘Update File‘ button.

The sub-menu problem in your Authority Pro theme should be solved now.

Filed Under: Blog Posts Tagged With: guides

The Best Free Annotation Tool for Presenters

October 19, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

If you’re into presentations or teaching something through screen sharing online with others, you know you cannot annotate, highlight nor zoom into the screen while presenting.

This is possible in some presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint to some extent but not without showing the audience what you are actually doing in front of them.

But here’s what’s possible after you read this guide post / watch this video:

  • You could draw,
  • write directly on the screen,
  • highlight directly over most desktop applications including the presentation software and web pages.

Here’s how to get them done.

Just head on to this website which is from Microsoft and download the ZoomIt software.

Once the zip file gets downloaded click on it to open it – this only contains the exe file and is a portable file – you only need to double-click to use it.

This exe file opens up an options dialog box. Just go through this video demo for a detailed walk-through of how to make use of all these options to suit your situation.

In case you are in the Teaching profession or in any training Department within your company then this is a very useful tool to keep handy.

Filed Under: Technology Tips, Blog Posts, PowerPoint Tips, Windows Tips Tagged With: guides, Resources, software, tools

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