How to sell study notes & guides online and prevent piracy

Selling study material online & why DRM is important

Learn where to sell study notes, what to sell, how much to sell them for, and how you can protect them against piracy and misuse.

How to sell notes and other study aids

Selling study materials, notes, cheat sheets, or even entire courses can be an excellent way to earn extra money while studying or even create a sustainable passive income. However, can is the operative word here. There are many pitfalls when selling study materials and uploading notes for money, from piracy to potential legality issues, excessive fees, and more.

This guide will cover everything you need to know if you want to start selling study notes online, including:

The legality of selling study notes
What kind of study materials you can sell
Where to sell study notes
How to price study notes
How to protect study materials from piracy
Key takeaways

Is it illegal to sell study notes online?

It’s important to clear up the legality of selling study notes and study materials before proceeding, keeping in mind that Locklizard is not a law firm, and this does not constitute legal advice.

We cannot say definitively whether selling your study notes is legal because this is dependent on what is in the notes and what country or state you are in. That said, as far as we can tell, selling study notes is generally not illegal if:

The notes do not contain copyrighted material (such as pictures of slides, images, copyrightable text, recordings, etc.) that you do not have a license for.
The notes were taken by you and are sufficiently transformative from the original lecture or seminar. You are paraphrasing the lecturer’s words rather than copying them word-for-word.
You state in your license that they are for personal study or educational purposes (i.e. you aren’t selling them to competing institutions or services).
Citations are quoted correctly, and sources are clearly stated.

Usually, notes or personally crafted study guides would be considered your original work if these criteria are met, and you would be able to sell them freely. If you’re able to get permission from the lecturer or your university/college, that would of course be even better. Naturally, though, if the notes were created in collaboration with another person or organization, the copyright may be shared.

Some US states, such as California, prohibit the sharing of educational notes in their education code. In such a case, it may be possible to argue that federal copyright of freedom of expression laws trump state law, but that’s not a risk we’d encourage.

Additionally, the policies of your academic institution and the law may not line up. In many colleges, selling study notes is prohibited and could get you reprimanded or thrown out. If in doubt, it’s best to consult with a lawyer before making a sale.

What kind of study materials can I sell?

Some study materials you can likely sell legally include:

Notes from lectures or seminars.
Study guides that you have personally crafted (provided they do not contain copyrighted material).
Example coursework or assignments, provided you have not submitted them and clearly state they are not to be used for cheating/plagiarism.
Summaries of books/chapters or textbooks, provided you have permission/ a license from the copyright holder or the book is in the public domain.
Your own practice material (such as questions, flashcards, etc.).

Study note examples

Some examples of specific, popular study materials include:

Amazon Knet quiz and summary
AP physics formula sheets
AAMC practice tests, F02 practice tests, NREMT practice tests, Servsafe practice tests
Nissan NNat exams, FISDAP readiness exams, Pharmacology Paxpat exams, Biochemistry ACS exams
acbeth Act 4 review questions
SAT practice test answers, Webce test answers, Everfi answers, NIHSS certification test answers
Pharmacology lecture notes
AP US history and world history notes

Where to sell notes online

Where can I sell my notes?

Several platforms or note selling websites allow you to sell study notes and guides online that have a broadly similar range of content and features. When deciding on a platform to upload notes for money, you should consider its payment model and what protection it provides against piracy. You don’t want a single user paying for your notes and sharing them with fellow students on their course.

You should also consider how you will get paid for notes (usually a percentage of the sale price) and when this will get paid.

Studypool

Studypool lets users offer a range of services to students, including tutoring and writing but also enables you to get paid for notes, guides, and other documents.

Is Studypool legit?

Studypool is not a scam, but it isn’t very transparent about how much sellers can expect to earn. It tells sellers that they can earn up to $10 per note “Unlock”, but it isn’t clear how payments are calculated. It says:

“If you are a Notebank Contributor, you may be eligible to receive payment from Studypool for contributing Notes to the Studypool community. The payment is dependent on the number of Notebank Subscribers that Unlock (defined below) your Notes and what type of Notebank Subscribers they are, and subject to our trust and safety review.”

Not exactly encouraging. Additionally, uploading a document to Studypool grants the company full copyright, including the ability to modify and redistribute your document as it sees fit. Studypool can also randomly select up to 50% of your notes to make them permanently free. Finally, other online sources suggest that you need at least $50 in your Studypool account before you can withdraw funds to your bank account.

In other words, if you use Studypool to sell notes, don’t expect to make much money, if any.

How does Studypool protect study notes from piracy?

Before unlock, Studypool displays the first few pages of a document as images. This is not ideal if your notes are only a few pages long, as users can just save the image and use that or run it through an OCR tool to turn it back into text. It also allows users to download notes once they have unlocked them, seemingly with no protection against mass sharing or redistribution. So, there is no real piracy protection here.

Studoc

Studoc is a modern-looking service that allows students to upload and read study notes as well as get help from an AI tutor. Most of its documents are free to view online, but the most popular ones, as well as certain features, are locked behind a premium subscription.

How much does Studoc pay for notes?

Studoc is legitimate – but it does not pay students for uploading documents. Instead, those who have documents approved get a 14-day premium membership. It’s unclear why you would choose it to host your notes on when you can provide them for money elsewhere.

How to download PDFs from Studoc

Studoc allows premium members to download content without any digital rights management (DRM). Users can share them with others at will so long as they are okay with breaking the site’s terms of service (and typically copyright law).

It is also simple to download Studoc content without premium membership. Each document’s HTML code is viewable and downloadable in the “Sources” panel of browsers’ developer mode. Users can download this as a HTML file to view the document offline and share it with others. A chrome extension called StuHack goes further, allowing users to download any document, including premium ones, as well as remove premium banners and blurred pages.

Stuvia

Established in 2010, Stuvia is one of the earlier platforms designed to help students sell notes, summaries, exams, flashcards, and more. It allows users to filter by school and specific courses/modules, as well as by document type. It takes a different approach to the other platforms mentioned so far, selling documents directly rather than offering a subscription service.

Is Stuvia worth it?

Stuvia allows sellers to price documents how they like and takes a commission on each sale. It tells you how much how much money you’ll make from each sale when choosing your pricing (typically ~50-60%) and also has the average earnings per sale, per month listed on its site. You must earn at least $10/£10 before you can withdraw.

There are various users on student forums that report successfully making money through Stuvia. Additionally, its terms seem reasonable, allowing the seller to remain the sole copyright holder of their documents.

Does Stuvia protect notes from piracy?

Stuvia doesn’t apply any protection to documents uploaded to its platform. Documents are delivered as a normal PDF file which the purchaser can freely share with others if they are willing to break Stuvia’s terms of service.

OneClass

OneClass sells access to class notes, textbook notes, study guides, homework help, and textbook solutions. It’s a little different to the other options presented in that it has an application process in which note takers can submit a sample of their notes in return for gift cards and official notetaker status. There are more requirements of notetakers in this program, but it promises consistent, predictable pay. Students can also upload notes as a contributor where OneClass says they’ll get a portion of a user’s subscription revenue when they subscribe to view their content.

Is OneClass legit / worth it?

Sellers report mixed experience with OneClass. The service claims to pay official notetakers $370-470 per course for each semester they are hired. Contributors receive up to 20% of the recurring revenue when somebody purchases a subscription to view their content. However, some uploaders say they have not been paid for their services and others that OneClass will only pay them in gift cards. Poor communication on both the customer and notetaker end are reported in Trustpilot reviews, as well as misleading practices and issues cancelling.

Does OneClass protect notes and guides?

OneClass users can freely download and share notes and guides with others. They can download an unlimited number of notes each month.

Knowt

Knowt is a general AI-powered note-taking and quiz platform that lets you sell the notes you take with it or in other software. You can also review notes, which pays a little more.

Is Knowt worth it?

It pays “up to $12” per study unit, or $15 if you review notes. You also get the platform’s premium subscription for free. As with all of these platforms, there are some caveats:

The company does not dislose up front how it decides whether you get $12 or some other smaller sum.
Submitting content to Knowt grants the company full, royalty-free copyright over your work, including the ability to create derivative works.
Their terms of service also state that you give up any right to sue the company in courts other than small claims court.
It’s not entirely clear how long the company expects you to make your “units”.
There’s no protection for notes — somebody can just copy-paste them and upload them to a different platform. Knowt even has a handy “Export to PDF” function.

Overall, this doesn’t seem like the worst platform, but there are some elements where additional clarity would be helpful.

Nexus Notes

Nexus Notes is another platform designed to read and sell study notes, with a focus on offering an extensive free catalog. For longer notes, a premium subscription is required, which costs $18/month. The site verifies notes that it considers good quality and markets itself as a “great way to make money on the side”.

Is Nexus Notes safe/worth it?

Nexus note authors are paid a percentage of the monthly revenue the platform collects. This percentage is determined by how many subscribers have added your notes to their library. Nexus is up front with the fact that “earnings are not guaranteed”, though it claims its top earners make thousands of dollars per year. As far as we could tell, however, Nexus Notes does not get much traffic, so the former is probably more likely.

Bear in mind that once you upload notes to Nexus, you can’t upload them anywhere else for three years, and you give up your copyright. So, if you upload them and don’t get any revenue, you may be out of luck.

Etsy

Due to the various issues with dedicated note-selling sites, many students have started selling notes on Etsy. This enables them to keep a much larger portion of the revenue as Etsy’s fees for digital products are reasonable – adding up to 87.5% per sale, including payment processing fees.

One downside of selling notes on Etsy is that it may be more difficult for them to be discovered naturally. As Esty is not purpose-built for selling study materials, it doesn’t have the same categories and school filtering as other platforms. You will likely have to do more legwork promoting your guides and notes to students.

Etsy does not have any built-in protection for digital files, so you will need to figure that out for yourself. However, considering other platforms usually don’t even allow you to implement protection, that shouldn’t be a major factor.

Payhip

Payhip is a simple platform for selling digital downloads. You upload your study materials to a browsable marketplace, which does have an education category. You can also make a dedicated store page, which you can link to from social media, etc.

Is Payhip legit?

Payhip has existed since about 2011 and is used by plenty of self-published authors and creators. It has a very creator-friendly payment model, taking 5% of each transaction for free users, 2% if you pay $29 a month, and 0% if you pay $99/month. This lets creators scale quite nicely and pick a plan that makes the most sense for their sales volume. Payhip credits your money straight away and doesn’t have a minimum withdrawal limit.

Some users do report issues with Payhip suddenly removing their store for content violations without clear communication surrounding why. Some users also say their support is slow to respond. Likely, the company has fewer staff than other platforms so that it can keep its fees low.

Does Payhip protect uploaded study notes?

Payhip lets you limit the number of times a user can download your products and stamp your PDFs with customers’ email addresses. Both of these protection measures are completely useless since customers can download the PDF once, remove their identifying information with a PDF editor, and share as many copies as they like. As a result, you should look into third-party DRM solutions if you don’t want your work stolen or pirated.

Your own website

Another option is to sell study guides on your own website. There are some challenges with this, such as getting your content discovered (you have to do your own marketing) and not having a support team behind you.

The advantages, however are:

You have full control over how your content is presented and delivered.
You do not have to compete with other sellers on the same site.
You get to keep 100% of the revenue that is generated from selling your guides and notes.
You can implement whatever protection you like such as using DRM to prevent sharing, copying, editing, printing and screen grabs.

How much should I sell my study notes for?

There’s no simple formula to effectively price your study notes, guides, or flashcards, or coursework examples. There are several factors that you must consider when choosing your sale price:

How much demand is there for the item?
Are you selling for a popular course with a lot of competition, or a niche one without many buyers? If you expect to get only a few sales, but that your document will be very useful to those customers, then higher pricing makes sense.
What are you fees and other costs?
If you’re selling on note selling websites or a platform with high fees, you may need to price higher to make it worth your while.
What is the competition?
How does the quality of your product compare with competitors and how much work have you put into it?
What prices will your target audience be able to justify?
You’ll probably have more luck selling Oxbridge notes for a high price than those from community college or high school, for example.

With all that said, we’ve analysed prices across several platforms so that you can get a general idea of how much different categories of study materials sell for. On average, sellers appear to charge $5-20 per item.

Lecture/course notes

The pricing of lecture and course notes can vary significantly depending on the level of education. The following prices should give you a general guideline:

Secondary education: $5-10
Higher education: $5-50
Qualifications: $10-40

Notes for science-based courses were typically listed for ~$3-10 more. In the $40-50 range, most notes were bundles from an entire academic year or course.

Flashcards

Flashcards seem to be able to command a good price for the amount of information conveyed. This is likely because significant effort goes into creating interesting designs and the content is not created naturally during class.

We found flashcards to cost between $7 and $25, with the lower end typically being basic flashcards found on Stuvia and the $15-25 range Etsy flashcards with nice designs.

Exam paper summaries/guides

These were mostly sold on Stuvia rather than platforms like Etsy, so there were limited data points. Generally, though, exam summaries sold for between $8 and $15. Some highly sought after exams were listed at $50+, but typically these included answers, which is likely to get you into trouble.

Book summaries

There was quite a bit of variance in book summary pricing. In our quick analysis they were usually listed between $7 and $20. Most fiction fell on the low end of that, while summarizes of thick, dense textbooks are on the higher. Some textbook summaries were listed as high as $50, but it’s difficult to say whether they made any sales at that price.

Study guide bundles

Study guide bundles for an entire course naturally command a higher price – usually bundling notes, advice, fact sheets, etc. On Stuvia they were mostly lower priced and lower quality, while Etsy had some highly produced bundles going for $20-80.

Exam question and answers

Exam questions and answers were one of the most popular categories on Stuvia, but really fall into two categories:

Example exam questions/explanations: $10-30.
Real exam questions with answers: Usually $10-50 (with maximum $1500).

Selling products in the second category could easily get you in trouble, particularly for exams that are currently in circulation, which naturally commanded the highest prices.

Essays

Essays were generally low-value items, probably because students can usually ask their teacher if they need examples. Most were listed at $7-10, but a few were as high as $25.

Theses

Theses are even less valuable than essays. This is likely because they tend to be highly specific and are often published after completion anyway. Typical pricing was $10-20.

How to sell notes online and avoid piracy

As we have demonstrated, making a living selling study or class notes online can be difficult. Many platforms have excessive fees or downright misleading practices that result in you earning nothing at all. Thankfully, you can sell on Etsy or your own website to maximize profit, but you still face a core issue – there is no protection for your work. It’s difficult to obtain a high volume of sales when students buy one copy of your material and then share it with the whole class.

The best way to address this is by employing a document DRM solution. A good DRM solution such as Locklizard Safeguard will encrypt your study notes so that only users with a license can open them and they cannot copy/paste, edit, screenshot, print, or otherwise share them without your permission.

This is how Locklizard protects study materials:

You choose a PDF file to protect and open it in the Safeguard Writer application.
There you choose which rights management controls you want to enforce. Editing, saving, and copying is automatically prevented, but you can decide whether you want to restrict printing and screenshots, set an expiry date, add watermarks, etc.
After publishing the document, you add users or user groups to it in your admin portal. You can choose to automatically email users their license file, which grants them access to the documents you specify by transmitting decryption keys to an encrypted keystore on their device which cannot be accessed or shared.
When the user receives their license file, they install it and the dedicated Locklizard viewer application on their machine. The license is tied to their device and by default is single use. This leaves them with no way to share access with other people other than sharing the device itself.
The user opens the document in the dedicated viewer application. The content is decrypted only in the computer’s memory. The viewer application enforces print, screenshot, copy-paste, and saving controls so that users have no good route to create unprotected copies of the content.
You can revoke access at any point, both for the document or for specific user accounts.

The result: every sale represents one student. See How to sell PDF files online securely.

Key takeaways for selling study materials online

To summarize, when selling study material online you need to think about the following:

The legality of your material
It’s important to ensure that publishing your content will not infringe on someone’s copyright or break your educational institute or state’s code of conduct. This is especially important to consider when selling cheat sheets and test answers such as Everfi answers.
What you are going to sell
Decide whether you want to sell study/exam guides, notes, flashcards etc. You should weigh both demand and which area you think you could best contribute to.
Where you are going to sell it
Most dedicated note and study guide selling platforms take a hefty fee, pay you a portion of subscription fees, or have a lottery system. You are usually far better off selling on Esty or your own website, where you can keep more of the revenue and have more control over how your documents are distributed.
How much to sell it for
Study material can sell for anywhere between $5 and $1500 depending on the content, but the higher end is reserved for exam answers that will likely get you in trouble to share. You can generally expect to price items at $5-50, but it’s up to you to decide where in that range your material should fall.
How you’ll protect your notes against piracy
Note selling websites usually let customers download documents with no restrictions. Even note selling sites that limit downloads provide no additional protection – once a user has downloaded your notes once they can upload them to another site. This allows them to share them with as many course mates as they like, or edit and sell them as their own, significantly eating into your sales.
Some sites provide PDF stamping, but as we have covered in our blog on PDF stamps, they can be easily removed, so are effectively useless.
A good desktop DRM solution is the best way to prevent piracy of your notes, as web-based protection such as secure data rooms use ineffective JavaScript controls and Adobe Acrobat security (PDF password protection) is useless.

If you want to sell PDF study notes on Esty or your website while minimizing piracy, take a 15-day free trial of our PDF DRM software.

FAQs

Can you sell study guides?

Yes, there are many note selling websites that enable you to upload notes for money, including study guides, cheat sheets and webce test answers, class notes and other study materials. You can also get paid for notes and study guides by selling them from your own website.

Can you make money selling study notes?

Absolutely, but it’s more hard work than some people expect. Many platforms pay you very little or take excessive fees, and without good protection, you run the risk that your notes will be shared between students far more than they are purchased. Choosing the right platform and DRM protection is key to turning selling study guides into a sustainable business.

Can you sell study notes on Etsy?

As long as your notes do not infringe on somebody’s copyright or other laws, you should be good to sell them on Etsy. Last we checked, there was nothing in the site’s policies against selling notes, and there were various people selling study material on the platform. If in doubt, though, talk to Etsy support.

Can you get paid to take exam notes?

Yes, note selling websites such as KnowtTaker enable you to get paid for writing and reviewing exam notes for popular exams.

How much money can students make selling study notes?

Anywhere from $0 to thousands of dollars per month, depending on which material they are selling, how high demand is, whether they are using DRM, how many products they have listed, and various other factors.

Can Locklizard protect notes in non-PDF formats?

No. Locklizard only protects PDF files and PDF attachments.

Can Locklizard protect handwritten notes?

Absolutely. Just use an application such as Adobe Scan to turn your physical notes into a PDF, and then protect the PDF using Locklizard Safeguard.

Do I need to ask my professor before I sell my notes?

It depends on your university’s policies and the content you are including in your notes. To be on the safe side, we’d always recommend talking to both your professor and other relevant people at your educational institution before you hit publish.

Can I sell my study notes on social media?

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram do not allow the sale of digital content such as PDFs and other document formats. However, you can always link to a service like Etsy or Payhip from your socials.

Do download limits and PDF stamping prevent piracy of notes?

No. Once a user has downloaded your notes they can edit them, upload them to another site and sell them as their own. PDF stamping can be easily removed – see how to remove PDF watermarks – so it provides no additional protection against note piracy.