Glenn Fleishman thought it might be a clever idea to offer his new book, Real World Adobe GoLive6 (with Jeff Carlson) as a free e-book download. Just a few hundred downloads expected, right? Wrong. The book proved a little more popular than he thought - like about ten thousand downloads in 36 hours worth of popular. And it could cost him a whopping $15,000 at the end of the month, because he's charged incrementally for his bandwidth, Wired says.
"It's a financial catastrophe," said Fleishman to the magazine. "I'm a working stiff with a mortgage ... I never suspected the penalty would be so high for giving something away.... It's like living in Singapore and getting 15 years in jail for chewing gum." All this to give a boost to a book that wasn't selling well in hardcopy. The former programmer and New York Times writer said he figured better to offer the whole book as a free .pdf download. There went that idea.
One problem was the file for the entire book took up 23MB because of its thick volume of graphics, Wired said. "I was aware I would be charged a fortune for high bandwidth," he said. "But I never suspected we would have topped a few hundred downloads." Boy, was he in for a surprise. He posted the .pdf-formatted book March 18. By March 20, Wired said, he learned the hard way how much traffic he'd attracted, pulling the fill offline - but not before he was liable for about 250GB worth of download.
