Read an E-Book Week 2010 is on!

[Marcy]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

That's brilliant, Steve. We've not had many more downloads than that single book, and we had twenty-five titles on offer out of the eighty-odd in our catalogue at SW. Mind you, you've steadily built a loyal ebook fan base, so you deserve to have done as well as you have. Best wishes. Neil

I think part of the reason you haven't had as many downloads is your titles don't show up at Smashwords when searching for the books available for free, since they didin't use the RFREE coupon. So, a lot of people never found them.

I only found them through your post here.

-Marcy

[neilmarr]

Hi Marcy, and thanks for that. You could well be right. We're pretty new to Smashwords and still learning the ropes. We certainly won't make this mistake next year. Our idea, of course, was that whilst offering free books to those who wanted them that way, we could also open the door to anyone who wanted to contribute a little toward the Red Cross effort in Haiti.

But, of course, there are other ways of giving to Haiti and we should have left the fund raising to experts. At least, though, there'll be a check for a couple of hundred dollars on its way.

Actually, there's a way for us to impliment your suggestion right now. At the end of the week (less than two hours from now), we'll be dropping our ebook prices across the board by a couple of dollars. And we had planned to put four selected titles each week on a set-your-own-price basis. It would not seem more effective to make those titles absolutely free instead and change them every fortnight.

Thanks again for sound advice ... something I've come to trust here.

Very best wishes. Neil

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Yes, Read an E-Book Week for 2010 is now history. Rita Toews reports:

The website is still getting a ton of visits even though the event is over. It had over 500 visits today.

In the few weeks leading up to, and including the event, it got 67,400 page views from people speaking 74 languages from 136 countries.

As well as what we think of as the "major" countries, the visitors came from Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Uganda, Botswana, South Korea, Suriname, Guatemala, and Cuba.

What I really noticed was the huge number of visitors coming through cell phones - both android and regular phones.

Pretty impressive figures, I think. And I'm particularly mindful of the heavy cellphone and smartphone turnout... especially as other countries, whose people use cellphones and smartphones as their primary computing/communication devices, are likely to be a bigger part of e-book reading in the future.

[neilmarr]

***cellphones and smartphones as their primary computing/communication devices, are likely to be a bigger part of e-book reading in the future.***

I'm sure you're right, Steve. And this is one trend that -- unlike dedicated readers -- might well influence the way some authors write.

For instance, in Japan five of last year's top ten selling books were adapted from mobile phone novels written in bite-sized episodes of a hundred or two words a day. Poetry and flash fiction also lends itself to mobile phone reading on the hop.

Not sure I'd like to tackle War and Peace on a cellphone, but my son -- an avid reader -- goes through many a full novel on his. Cheers. Neil