Shedding Bikes

On April 27th it'll be about 1 year since I started Learn Python The Hard Way and I thought I'd check the statistics out for downloads. I'm now kicking myself for not having tracked this sooner, because it looks like it's been downloaded 335 thousand times. I totally don't believe those numbers myself. That's insane so I want to share the knowledge with others to get them validated.

I'm putting the access logs for GET requests online for others to verify the numbers and tell me if I'm getting them right. You can download the stats logs in bzip2 format and review them. Feel free to tell me what you think the real download stats are for the .pdf of the book.

I'm doing this because, frankly, I had no idea there was such a huge market for cheap or free books teaching programming. Hell, for teaching programming at all. I just thought that it'd maybe get 10k downloads maximum by the end of the year. That's what I heard was a good run for a programming book. If these download logs are true, then I think everyone is seriously under evaluating the power of online publishing.

I think right now those of us writing tech books are fed numbers from the major publishers, who have incentives to either flat out lie or who simply don't sell that many copies. That means when people like me put a book up for free, we're operating under false assumptions about its reach. I'm hoping that my raw access logs (with ip addresses removed) will give people who want to publish a similar book a bit more information so they can make good decisions.

Hopefully, with data like this there will be more incentive for people to publish books online like I did and either make them free or charge about $1. If I'd have charged $1 I probably could have made a pretty penny. Then again, it wouldn't have educated so many people so I'm more happy with this outcome.

But you bet your ass I'm writing some more of these and charging a enough to make $1 or $2 off each copy.