“Last week, writer Glenn Fleishman offered his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, as a free download. | But instead of the few hundred downloads Fleishman expected, the book was downloaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he’s charged incrementally for bandwidth, Fleishman estimates he could be billed $15,000 at the end of the month — possibly a lot more….Fleishman decided to offer the book as a free download after reading an editorial by technical publisher Tim O’Reilly that argued that obscurity is a far greater menace to authors than electronic piracy.” Leander Kahney

—When a Free Download Isn’t Free Wired)

While the Internet is great for giving away small, free files (such as web pages), Fleishman’s book has huge graphic files, making it extremely expensive (in terms of bandwidth) to download.