When you get too popular

Glenn Fleishman describes how he narrowly avoided a $15,000 excess bandwidth bill when he released a free PDF version of his book on Adobe GoLive.

As interesting as recounting of that tale and his comments on shopping for bandwith, however, are his comments on why peer-to-peer networks aren't quite ready to handle distribution of such texts. Among them:

"In peer-to-peer systems, however, you can't necessarily be sure that a given file is the same an author meant to upload, that the file has been vetted for viruses, or that each version of the file throughout a network is the same as every other file. BitTorrent uses cryptographic hashing to verify that the file you received was correctly and legitimately reassembled, but it doesn't verify as a system that it's the file that an author or creator intended it to be."