[ic] Subscription service for electronic documentation.

interchange-users@icdevgroup.org interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Tue Oct 29 16:57:01 2002


Quoting Josef Karthauser <joe@tao.org.uk>:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm looking at interchange as a basis for a site for selling access to
> electronic documents.  I've played with the "soft goods" demo and it
> looks sweet, but doesn't quite do what I need it to yet and I was
> wondering how to go ahead customising it.
> 
> What I want to do is to sell access to PDF files on a time-out basis,
> i.e. the customer pays some dollar rate and can then access a file for
> download for up to 24 hours.  After that they lose access to the data.
> We would then want to also sell a subscription, which would allow them
> to have access to a group of files for a time period.
> 
> I'd really appreciate any clues as to how to go about this.  Is it
> possible?
> 
> Joe
> 

Oreilly does something like this with their Safari product, but they do not 
use .PDF files.  The problem with .PDF is that the file actually gets 
transferred to the client's machine and then is opened using your browser as a 
container. The file actually is on your machine, which means you can rename it 
and copy it to wherever you want. Check out the safari site at oreilly.com and 
see how they did the same thing using HTML.  I think interchange can 
accomplish the same thing.