One week ago, Glenn Fleishman offered his technical book Real World Adobe GoLive 6 for free online: all 922 pages and 23 megabytes of it. He expected a few hundred downloads and a boost to the sales of the print version of his book. Alas, a few thousand people downloaded it without sales of the print version increasingly substantially--and Fleishman is now facing a potential $15,000 in bandwith costs.
You can help defray his costs via Amazon and Paypal.
This could be an argument for establishing centralized distribution depots for books and other intellectual property that authors want to give out for free. But probably a better and cheaper way to deal with these distribution costs is to offer up this material on P2P networks.
Read the article here.