A marketing exercise
Despite the fact that writers have been giving their books away on the internet since, oh, about five minutes after the internet existed, there's a paucity of data on the subject of how books spread and who reads them. I'd like to go some way towards remedying this.
I'm going to place the text of Accelerando on this website in a couple of days. My server logs will tell me how many people download the book. A script I hacked together that polls Amazon.com's web services API will tell me how the book is selling. (One may assume that what goes for Amazon also goes for other booksellers.) But I don't know how downloads from my site reflect the real body of readers: is a surge in sales related to a surge in downloads three days earlier, or to something else? In the interests of joining up the dots, I'm therefore going to conduct a little experiment. (You may opt out of it if you don't want to participate – details below.)
The novel will be distributed in a variety of formats, including HTML (as a web page). The HTML version contains a web bug: an invisible image that calls my server whenever it is loaded by a web browser with internet access. This will (I hope) give me a crude count of the number of people reading the book, as opposed to the number who download the HTML file from this site.
I'm not going to collect any information about you, other than the raw fact that someone opened the file at a given date and time. Indeed, collecting individually identifiable information would be illegal under UK law without my complying with the Data Protection Act and related regulations. Nevertheless, if you still feel I'm infringing your privacy you have my permission in advance to (a) download and read the file on a machine that isn't connected to the internet, or (b) to chop out the offending web-bug. (It's right at the end, along with a helpful comment.) But please don't redistribute copies of the file from which the bug has been removed. Doing so will skew my figures, and potentially make it harder for me to argue the case for releasing future novels as free downloads with my editors.