Rough Guides eBook Development
Ecommnet developed and currently maintains the Rough Guides website, which is built entirely on WordPress and launched in 2013. Shortly after launch, Rough Guides asked us to build an ecommerce platform that allows their customers to purchase digital versions of their travel guides. A core requirement of this platform was the ability to apply light DRM watermarks to each ebook at the time of purchase. When a customer orders a travel guide through the Rough Guides web shop, a request is sent to a secure processing server to apply a light DRM watermark. This watermark contains unique information to identify who originally purchased the ebook. The processing server downloads the ebook files from secure storage and applies the appropriate watermark for each available format. The watermarked files are then uploaded to secure storage, ready for email delivery. For Rough Guides, the benefits of this system are hugely important. Without it, they would not be able to sell travel guides on their own website and instead have to rely on third party retailers that will take a cut from every ebook sold. The information stored in these watermarks helps trace the origin of the ebooks in the event they are illegally distributed online, protecting them from piracy.