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Here is an article from John Wolf: March 2009 Pen Jabs Meeting

March Gathering of writers and editors of the Pen Jabs Club at Rockin' Baja in Old Town

Pauline Hager, LinDee Rochelle, John Wolf - Pen Jab hardliners met to gab about eBooks and how to get 'em on your website. If you have a PayPal account, the tricky part is done for you.

When you go on PayPal and set up a "Buy Book" button, you can have them redirect the transaction back to your website after the payment. This is the main trick. Place the code they give on your buy book page next to the book. After a payment, PayPal redirects to the download page (the trick mentioned above). This page can be as simple as a link to a pdf file of your book. You should say on that page that once the download is done, come back to this page and hit a "Return" button at the bottom of the page that actually goes to a thank you page first to closeout the transaction. This page uses an HTML trick, a meta tag the holds on this page for a certain time you specify and then returns the buyer to your page that started all this, your buy a book page.

Here's a sample meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5; URL=buy_books.html">

Refresh tells the browser what's going on, The 5 means five second delay and the URL redirects the browser back to you buy books page. To the buyer, it looks all organinzed and professional.

PayPal also sends you an email telling you that the buy took place. It includes all the buyer info like name and email address. If you specify in the setup, it will include snail mail address and special instructions from the buyer. This is useful if you are not downloading, but intend to email the eBook or send a real book - signed by the author I hope. Anyway, that's the basics. Other methods involve PHP code on the server-side; probably you're not going to learn that right away.

PHP is a cool language, because it can creat HTML pages and sent them back to the browser, so you could have PayPal redirect to a PHP file that not only automatically downloads the file, but builds a thank you page afterwards and sends it back to the brower totally automating the steps. The buyer gets the download, say to the desktop, the page tells him where to find it and thanks him for the buy ( it could even grab the name from PayPal and personalize the response), then redirects back to the buy book page. Bada-boom Bada-bing.