Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, April 04, 2003

Caution to open-access providers. When print sales of his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, began to wane, Glenn Fleishman made the book into a PDF file and put it on his web site for any interested reader to download without charge. The free edition turned out to be very popular, and he had more than 10,000 downloads in first 36 hours alone. Trouble is, Fleishman buys bandwidth incrementally from his ISP and may have to pay $15,000 at the end of the month for these downloads. He's taken the file offline while he thinks about what to do. (PS: Check with your ISP before hosting an archive, deposit your content in an existing archive, put multiple copies at multiple sites, or as Cory Doctorow recommends in this case, use P2P. It doesn't have to work out this way.)