Below are the figures for how many people read/bought Barefoot into Cyberspace. The amount of data I have to present is now outgrowing my crass skills at html table-making, so I’ve started a public spreadsheet on Google Docs with these figures going back to August.
I’m providing these figures for people who are interested in the nuts and bolts of a book project undertaken outside of the world of mainstream publishing and with a Creative Commons element. When I started, I intended to provide these figures on a month-by-month basis, but as the title of this blog post suggests, I haven’t been so great at doing that. So if you want to be pinged each time I update these figures, without cluttering your RSS reader with my musings and links on new technologies and fundamental rights, I suggest that you subscribe to this RSS feed.
| Aug-Oct | Nov | Dec | TOTALS | |
| html | 4,488 | 197 | 341 | 5,026 |
| 3,429 | 278 | 947 | 4,654 | |
| ePub | 593 | 35 | 301 | 929 |
| Kindle | 233 | 13 | 18 | 264 |
| Direct | 106 | 11 | 2 | 119 |
| POD | 130 | 8 | 21 | 159 |
| TOTAL | 8,979 | 542 | 1,630 | 11,151 |
Some explanation:
- The last two days of July are incorporated in the figures for August
- html stats are number of views as reported by WordPress
- pdf stats are number of reads as reported by Scribd
- ePub stats are kindly provided by Terence Eden
- Direct stats are the number of print copies I have sold directly at speaking events
- POD are the number of print-on-demand copies reported by Lightning Source, the print-on-demand partner for the book.
- Kindle stats are provided by the Kindle direct publishing platform at kdp.amazon.com
The Barefoot Technologist 
If you were willing, it would be incredibly interesting to see how much revenue each source brings in.
For example, is POD more profitable than Kindle etc.
Obviously, that would only show direct purchases – not the halo effect from any extra consulting etc.
I’m totally up for doing this. I want to do quite a systematic “lessons wot I have learned” post in the near future, so I’ll disclose income streams then. For now, let’s just say that Direct sales bring in the most revenue, then Kindle, then POD. And that I’ve yet to break even on my research costs (although I’m getting close), and don’t expect to break even on my labour costs unless some lovely soul decides they want to buy the film rights.