Selling online content organized by issues

Hi there.

After posting on the support forum and on the Ubercart website, I beleive this is the right place to discuss my problem.

We are a magazine that comes out "hand made" in a PDF format. For the time being, we only deliver to subscribers by email.

I’m trying to develop our web site using Drupal and Ubercart. A part of our content is free and can be seen by anonymous users. The other part is not free.

We are organizing our online content by issues just like the way it’s done on the physical support: issue_1, issue_2 .. etc. For this we use taxonomy.

We want to be able to sell any published issue. When it’s sold and the payment made, the buyer can download the pdf file of the issue, AND can access the content of the issue online (the all set of articles that constitute the issue).

While there’s no problem for the first part : giving access to the file to be downloaded, I’m not sure about the way we made it for the second part: giving access online to the issue’s content.

In fact, we created as many roles as we have issue taxonomies. i.e:
for taxonomy_issue_1 we have role_issue_1
for taxonomy_issue_2 we have role_issue_2
.
.
for taxonomy_issue_n we have role_issue_n

When issue_1 is bought, the buyer is granted the role_issue_1 that allows him to see online the content of issue_1 (which is all the articles with the taxonomy issue_1).

While this works, it somehow seems “weighty”. I can hardly imagine a site working smoothly but structured with hundreds of roles.

What do you think? Are we doing it wrong? I think something based on user taxonomy access (like in TAC_Lite) would be a better implementation but I can’t figure how this module can work with Ubercart.

Any suggestions?

Thanks