In December 2007, one of the ways people talked about making money online was through the sale of eBooks. Being the curious engineer that I am, I decided the best way to learn about this was to investigate directly. So I bought an eBook about making money with eBooks. Very meta, I know.
The eBook Landscape in 2007
The eBook market in 2007 was a wild place. There was no Kindle ecosystem yet. Amazon's Kindle had just launched in November 2007, and most people had never seen one. eBooks in the internet marketing world were typically PDF files sold through platforms like ClickBank, often with long-form sales pages full of bold red text and countdown timers.
The quality varied enormously. Some eBooks contained genuinely useful information. Many were thinly veiled affiliate marketing funnels where the real product was teaching you to sell the same eBook to someone else. The whole ecosystem had a pyramid scheme energy that made my engineering brain uncomfortable.
What I Learned
The eBook I purchased was a ClickBank product, and while I do not remember the specific title, I remember the lesson: information products can be legitimate businesses, but the internet marketing world was full of hype and questionable quality at the time. The sales page promised much more than the content delivered, which was a pattern I would see repeated hundreds of times over the following years.
eBooks and Digital Products in 2026
The digital product landscape has matured enormously since 2007. Here is what has changed:
Kindle and other platforms legitimized eBooks. Amazon's Kindle platform turned eBooks from a niche internet marketing tactic into a mainstream publishing format. Self-publishing on Kindle became a viable business for thousands of authors.
Digital products expanded far beyond eBooks. In 2026, digital products include online courses, membership sites, templates, software tools, communities, and coaching programs. The eBook is now just one small piece of the digital product ecosystem.
Quality expectations increased dramatically. Consumers in 2026 expect polished, well-designed digital products. The days of slapping together a 30-page PDF and selling it for $47 through a hypey sales page are mostly over.
Platforms made selling easier. Tools like Gumroad, Teachable, and Podia make it straightforward to create and sell digital products without needing a ClickBank account or building your own payment infrastructure.
If you are considering creating a digital product today, the fundamentals I was trying to understand in 2007 still apply: create something genuinely valuable, price it fairly, and find the right audience for it. The tools have gotten better, but the principle has not changed.
