Hi. I have an E-book which I'm about to publish. I wanted to know if I put it on a password protected directory how that would work? Example, lets say 10 people buy my e-book, do I just send it to those clients with the same password? Or is there a way to change the password for each person. I guess what I'm trying to get to is, can I protect my e-book thru my hosting or do I have to do it with another software and not the host?

You may find it much easier to either

1) contract with Payloadz.com or Lulu.com to hold a copy of your e-book, collect money from purchasers, and handle their downloading of a copy in a secure manner.

2) use a standard shopping cart that supports digital downloads. osCommerce will do this; probably others too. You have to arrange for a payment service such as PayPal or a merchant account and credit card payment gateway, and you have to figure out what to do about collecting sales tax in your state.

If you're going to have only one product and manually distribute passwords to customers, a single password protected directory is the wrong way to go. Not only can your customers get a copy of the e-book, but they can also modify it or erase it, inconveniencing others (unless you make the file and directory read-only). They can freely pass around the password so lots of people can get it for free. You could give each customer their own directory and password, with their own copy of the e-book, and erase the copy and directory after the customer reports a successful download or a time limit is reached. That's basically what digital download services and shopping carts do. A similar process would be individual FTP accounts, rather than username and password access to a directory (are your customers computer-savvy enough to use FTP?). I guess it comes down to how many products will you be handling, and how much work are you willing to do for each customer versus the setup cost (time and money) of a download service or a shopping cart? What's the upper limit for the number of customers you will need to handle? Setting up directories, or at least, IDs and passwords, gets real old real fast when you're handling dozens of buyers a day.