Joe goes to site buys information and hes able to access that information right then after its purchased...

I may be misunderstanding you but how does he buy it if the site does not have ecommerce?

You may be able to use PayPal for this. User goes to your site, clicks a PayPal buy button, at the end is redirected (or sent an email with the location of) the 'secret content'. Make sure the secret content page has a noindex tag and don't link to it directly yourself, etc. You could also use mod_rewrite or drop in a bit of PHP so that someone can only see the e-book page of they are sent from the PayPal domain. Another way would be to give them a username and password in a message after they pay on eBay and then they would need this to access the e-book (use .htpasswd on Apache).
In short there are a lot of ways to do it but yes at some point they have to go through an e-commerce transaction, but you can avoid having a full on shopping cart.

Thanks for clarifying guys. Greatly appreciated.

I've been using the PayPal "Buy Now" Buttons redirect for years to sell informational products without a glitch. It may not be the most cutting edge appraoch, but it works ;~)

Lovejoy- Out