The Edwardian Riggses of America
The Meaning of the Download Counter
by Alvy Ray Smith
The download counter is a count of all downloads from my website with /Riggs/ in the url. This includes all my electronically published books and papers, name indexes, and auxiliary files in the .pdf format on my Riggs website. The count began on 1 Jan 2000, but most of the downloads occurred since 1 Jan 2009.
A snapshot made on 1 Oct 2010 will indicate how the number on the download counter breaks down. Name indexes are not counted in any of these numbers:
4206: total Riggs book downloads - that is, of Vol 2-8
4178: total Riggs paper downloads
4411: total Vol 1 auxiliary file downloads (gen 4 census, appendixes, etc.)
This accounts for about 12000 of 18108 downloadsn as of 1 Oct 2010, the remainder being name index downloads.
Perhaps the most interesting number here, to me anyway, is the 4206 downloads of Vols 2-8 (Vol 1 is available in print only). Since I test every upload with a download, for every version of Vols 2-8 that is uploaded, then my own downloads account for say 200 of the 4206 downloads. So the approximate total number of Riggs books downloaded by persons other than myself is 4000. That's for almost two years (I only published Vols 2-7 in 2009 and Vol 8 in Oct 2010). Compare this to less than 200 copies of Vol 1 sold since it was (print) published in 2006, including about 50 copies to me as gifts for my contributors. Since Vol 8 is new to the series, most of the downloads are for Vols 2-7. Summarizing, about 400-800 copies each of Vols 2-7 have "sold" in less than two years, counting a download as a "sale," while only 150 copies of Vol 1 have sold in three years. Clearly genealogy books are not big sellers! But I am gratified that this web-book approach is reaching more people faster.
Here are the actual numbers per volume on 1 Oct 2010 (and not counting name index downloads):
vol 2: 425
vol 3: 1784 (for all 3 parts, so about 600 each)
vol 4: 376
vol 5: 811
vol 6: 442
vol 7: 366
vol 8: 2