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 29 Nov 2009 will indicate how the number on the download counter breaks down. Name indexes are not counted in any of these numbers:

    1094:   total Riggs book downloads - that is, of Vol 2-7

    299:     total Riggs paper downloads

    4620:   total Vol 1 auxiliary file downloads (gen 4 census, appendixes, etc.)

This accounts for 6013 of 7546 downloads, the remainder being name index downloads.

Perhaps the most interesting number here, to me anyway, is the 1094 downloads of Vols 2-7 (Vol 1 is available in print only). Since I test every upload with a download, for every version of Vols 2-7 that is uploaded, then my own downloads account for say 100 of the 1094 downloads. So the approximate total number of Riggs books downloaded by persons other than myself is 1000. That's for one year (I only published Vols 2-7 this year, 2009). 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 Vols 6-7 are new to the series, most of the downloads are for Vols 2-5. Summarizing, about 200 copies each of Vols 2-5 have "sold" in one year, 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.