New software request: Automatic digital delivery post-sale tool

[yacht_boy]

Hi all-

I've been participating in a lively discussion over at the e-books community group on yahoo's boards (http://groups.yahoo....oup/ebook-community/).  It seems that we have uncovered a glaring hole in the software world:

Many authors are experimenting with self-publishing and the use of ebooks as a delivery method.  Many of them are struggling with automatic delivery of the ebooks after payment.  There are plenty of services that offer this, but all of them are pretty expensive--some charge $30 or more a month, others want as much as 15% of every sale.  Some of the better open source shopping carts offer digital delivery, like zen-cart.com, but these are database systems aimed at stores with multiple (hundreds or thousands) products.  It seems like overkill to install a whole mySQL/php setup just to sell one book, which is what most authors have.

I figured there must be a product out there that will do this, but in half an hour of googling, I found none that were affordable.

Does anyone out here want to take on the challenge of designing a simple, easy to use, easy to integrate shopping cart system that will do auto-delivery of books or other files post-sale, both directly from the author's page and via ebay, without a database?  Seems like it shouldn't be that hard for the talent we have here!  I can bet that it would be a top seller or drawer of new members to DC. 

If I haven't been clear enough, let me know.  I don't frequent the boards, so shoot me an email:  [DELETED]

Thanks!
Jason

[brotherS]

I don't frequent the boards, so shoot me an email:

-yacht_boy (January 13, 2006, 05:17 PM)

That's not very polite. Forums are there for forum discussions. If you didn't know: you could easily subscribe to threads and will get an email when someone answers.

[yacht_boy]

Sorry, not trying to be rude.  As an occasional end user (and paid member), I simply find most of the discussions on these forums to be over my head, and I am active on several forum boards already and have to limit how many I check every day. 

Figured out that "notify" was the same as the "subscribe" box I'm used to looking for after I posted.  I was confused because the option to subscribe isn't available when you are writing a new post, for some reason.  You have to subscribe after posting.  A small flaw in otherwise good forum software.

So now I'm subscribed.  If you want more info about the suggestion, email or post the question here.

Jason

[brotherS]

I was confused because the option to subscribe isn't available when you are writing a new post, for some reason.  You have to subscribe after posting.  A small flaw in otherwise good forum software.

-yacht_boy (January 13, 2006, 05:39 PM)

Not sure about that, but you could always enable subscription for all topics you start/reply to in your forum profile.

[mouser]

some of the shareware payment services have the ability to automatically send files after a purchase, which sounds like what you want.  there are some paypal scripts as well that would do this.  we use a (php) paypal script here that could be modified to do what you want as well. it does use a database though to keep track of payments (as do most paypal scripts).

when you say its overkill to install php+mysql - most server accounts have php and mysql enabled anyway so it's not a matter of installing it, just a matter of configuring and using it..