When a Free Download Isn't Free
Leander Kahney,
Wired News,
Mar 27, 2003
There's a lesson in this. When Glenn Fleishman's new book, a hefty 23 megabyte PDF file, was offered for free on his website the number of downloads left his web server staggering under the load and Fleishman facing a $15,000 bandwidth charge from his service provider. So what's the lesson? No, it's not that he should have charged money for the book; commercial sites have also faced the scourge of hefty bandwidth charges and have been unable to recoup their losses. Rather, it's that the distribution of popular resources on the internet must be decentralized. Instead of requiring that people download from his site, he should have encouraged people to copy the file and make it available on their own sites. Oh, and you should really monitor your bandwidth usage. Boy, that's a tough way to learn a lesson.
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