Read only content

Hi, I’m not sure if this is the right place, but the thing is that I’m working on a project with my partner and we’re creating an e-course, so we are selling the premium course via membership type of thing(memberstack), so know we face the next problem, how can we make the pdf file with the course only readable? So the premium users can’t download it
Thank you in advance


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

Once you give people access to a PDF file via a URL to that file, I don’t think you can prevent them from saving it to their device/s.

You may consider hosting your PDFs on a third party document hosting platform that has such protection. I guess there would be several options. I’ve used Publitas before, and according to the following link, disabling and enabling downloads is a feature for customizing their PDF viewer.

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Okay, cool, thank you for your answer. Could you maybe suggest something that could deliver the idea where a person can buy a course, and he can access the text but he can’t download it and then re-publish it elsewhere, even if you any one could point the direction where I should look at
Thank you in advance

In my opinion, there is nothing you can do to absolutely prevent someone from republishing what you’ve created. Take any subscription service, e.g. online news site, course…, any subscriber to those could just copy and paste content and theoretically use it elsewhere and even re-publish it. Even if you were to provide a non-copyable format, someone could still re-type text, for example. That’s just how the world works…

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Yeah I know that there will always be a way to re-publish it but the thing is that the file is about 160 pages long so I wanted to make sure that they can’t just download file which will take 5sec, if they want to re-type that, they can do that but that will take much more effort and not that many people will be ready to do that, hopefully you understand what I mean by this :smiley: But thanks for your answers :wink:

They I think that a good option would be a document hosting service like Publitas. Another suggestion would be this one PDF Viewer - Embed PDF widget on Webflow website (free and fast) where it also says something about “switch off Download file label”.

160 pages sounds like rather a lot and potentially painful to navigate through. Perhaps you could consider splitting this.

Hi folks!

@spirelli thanks a lot for recommending us!
@Andasolo yes, we do have a widget to let you display your PDF files. You can also disable the Download button from the widget itself, however, they will still be able to download files when opening on the browser.

In case this scenario could work for you, feel welcome to check the widget here - PDF Viewer widget - Embed any PDF Files to your Website (free and fast).

And don’t hesitate to contact us if any help needed :slightly_smiling_face:

Regards,
Elfsight Team

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