EBooks/eLibraries just seemed to be the most natural thing for the Internet when I first got on...you could type in a book anywhere on the Net and anyone, any time, anywhere, and the rest of history could get it out, free of charge.

It took so little time, money and effort on my part, well, ALL my time, money and effort, but compared to what the result is, the cost-benefit ratio is just amazing!

The initial response was about six per cent of all the people I knew on the Net, which was larger than I expected. Obviously, that first file has now been downloaded, copied, re-edited, etc, by millions, if not a billion readers.

How important is copyright today? Can we foresee a world in which books are available without copyright?
The major purpose of copyright today is to keep people from getting any information without paying for it. This is even more true for me, here in the US, than in India
where copyright terms haven't been extended so much.

Here, I now have a copyright system: The Supreme Court has ruled that copyright will be extendable as many times, for as many years. That means Mickey Mouse and Winnie The Pooh, etc will never go into the public domain. Hundred years ago, about half of all copyrights had expired; 100 years from now, not even one per cent of copyright will have expired.

Since the publishers control copyright terms through lobbies and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), there is no chance for your, "world in which books are available without copyright" unless there are major, major changes.

You are an author and you have successfully created an ebook. Great! Now what do you do to make a profit? Have you thought about offering resell rights to it. This helps makes the most of your profits when selling your ebook.

Here are a couple of ways to make more money with resell rights to your book:

1. The Upfront Sale - your money comes from simply selling your book.

2. Back-end Sale - this is your residual income. This is where extra money comes from the affiliate links that you place in your book. These links are most often going to be two tiered and, hopefully, they are from your own affiliate program. So, in other words, you have created an ebook. Now you need to promote it, so you create an affiliate program for it. With an affiliate program, you get free advertising and the affiliates get a percentage as their commission. You join your own affiliate program and put that link in the book.

The buyers of resell rights to your book get to keep all the profits made from directly selling your book. This is fine because, in the book, you have links to your other products to help you acquire their customers as well.

3. Re-branding fee - there are sellers of your book that will want to get in on the back end sales as well. So you then encourage your buyers to join your affiliate program and let them "re-brand" the affiliate links at the end of the book. You charge them a small fee for this re-branding. This is great if you own a site that is a monthly paid membership service. You now have another income source.

4. Selling Resale Rights - if you market and sell the resale rights to your ebook separately, you can charge up to five times the amount of the normal price for the book. You can also sell the resale rights to your ebook as a bonus for purchasing your ebook to get viral marketing without additional effort on your part.

How do you set up an offer for resale rights to your ebook? You need to set up a separate order page that your customers go to when they click the order buttons from the main sales page. They already want to buy your ebook, so this is the ideal time to offer them resale rights for a set up fee as a bonus option for ordering your book. Providing that your ebook is high quality and in demand, your customers will have no problem buying the resale rights because they will see the benefit in being able to make more money than they spent on the purchase.

This is your hard work, or the work of your ghostwriter, so offering the resale rights is an up-sell. When they buy the book, you could offer the resale rights at a discount. This works incredibly well with new ebooks because the first few people to buy the resale rights and start selling will make the most money.

Resale rights can cause a huge surge in sales. People will be scrambling to get it - think about the iPhone. Ok, there were no resale's involved there, but it was new and people stood in line to buy them the first day.

To maximize your profit, don't limit yourself to just selling your ebook. Save money on advertising by having others sell it for you. Best of luck and happy sales!