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 Jan 2014 will indicate how the number on the download counter breaks down. Name indexes are not counted in any of these numbers:

    18119:   total Riggs book downloads - that is, of Vol 2-9

    20856:   total Riggs paper downloads

    12238:   total Vol 1 auxiliary file downloads (gen 4 census, appendixes, etc.)

This accounts for about 51213 of 66805 /Riggs/ downloads as of 1 Jan 2014, the remainder being mostly name index downloads.

Perhaps the most interesting number here, to me anyway, is the 18119 downloads of Vols 2-9 (Vol 1 is available in print only). This amounts to an average of  2257 downloads PER VOLUME (counting all 3 parts of Vol. 3 as one volume). Compare this to about 200 copies of Vol 1 sold since it was (print) published in 2006. Clearly genealogy books are not big sellers! But I am gratified that this web-book approach is reaching many more people faster.

Here are the actual downloads per volume on 1 Jan 2014 (and again not counting name index downloads):

vol 2: 1194 (873 pages)

vol 3: 6834 (for all 3 parts, so about 2278 each) (part 1: 396 pages; part 2: 544 pages; part 3: 574 pages)

vol 4: 1122 (620 pages)

vol 5: 2270 (566 pages)

vol 6: 1784 (176 pages)

vol 7: 1731 (148 pages)

vol 8: 1645 (412 pages)

vol 9: 1473 (512 pages)

for a total of 4821 downloadable pages. For completeness:

vol 1: 1473 (794 pages)

for a grand total 5615 pages in the 9 Riggs volumes (so averaging about 624 pages each, or about 510 pages each if you count Vol 3 as 3 volumes instead of 1)