How is your bro’s online Harry Potter book doing?

Do you have any stats on how many people have downloaded it?

Have you read it?

Do you know anyone else that has read it?

If so, what did they think about it?

The Veil of Mystery (whole book) was downloaded by 102 people in April, 206 people in May, and so far 50 people in June, for a total of 358 total downloads; this is just for the whole-book form, and does not count the chapter-by-chapter downloads, which account for a few dozen more full downloads, and the 78 downloads of the full book in plain-text format. So Veil has gotten about 450 downloads so far in the past two months.

The whole-book version of “Ring” was downloaded by 60 people in May and 40 people so far in June. Another few dozen downloaded the whole book by chapters, and 48 downloaded the plain-text version, for a total of about 170 so far in the span of one month.

This is also a secondary site for the books; the main site is at Schnoogle/Fiction Alley, with my brother’s page here. I don’t know how many downloads he’s seen over there, though it is more in page views, since they don’t have PDF versions there.

As for what people are saying, just do a site search for “harry potter” and look at the comments for each post.

I searched “harry potter” at blogd.com and found in the comments 3 folks that have read the book (I think).

Also, I typed “relaxing in a recently conjured lawn chair” into google (this is the 1st sentence of the book) and it found it at blogD and snoodle; which means search engine spiders are down loading it.

How can one determine how many of these downloads are not regular readers?

If you have multiple links on a page, one for the whole books, and one for chapters, what are the stats on each link?

I would think the spiders would pull all items, yet regular users would focus on the whole book, or start w/ chapter 1.

Yes, Google and other search engines spider text and pdf files. The stats for my site are displayed not just in blog pages, but all non-image files, so I can see how many times any TXT, PDF, MOV, MPG or other unusual file types were downloaded.

AwStats is a very nice statistics program that way. It gives you tons of information–unfortunately, much of it is ripped to shreds by spammers. But some info is still valid, including the Harry Potter file downloads. I can also see that about 30 people a month download the movie of my hamster trying to get a chicken bone into her cage.

As for which downloaders are “regular readers” (of the blog, you mean?), there’s no way to tell. The stats aren’t nearly that specific, and that’s one area where spam would obliterate any meaningful data in any case.

On this page:

http://www.blogd.com/archives/001234.html

How many “people” downloaded?

“whole book veil”
“ch1-3 veil”
“ch4-6 veil”
“ch22-24 veil”

“whole book ring”
“ch1-3 ring”
“ch4-6 ring”
“ch22-24 ring”

Ummm… why the request for such specific stats?

Besides, the stats don’t reveal which page the download started from.

The spiders will download everything, so if the first 4 items had 50+N, 50+X, 50+Y, 50 downloads; then one might say 50 spiders hit, N people got the whole book, and X people go the 1st chapter, and Y folks got the 2nd installment. This would be assuming the last installment was all spiders, which is not 100% correct, yet may be close, since folks who want all may download the whole thing.

However, if these items are listed on many web pages, where this whole list of choices is not always displayed on each page, then the download data might be more confusing.

If you placed a simple link on the page in a tiny font that is a color that is 1 shade different from the background, how many “folks” do you think would “click” it?

To get back on topic here…

It’s not a translator that Sapporo and oh so many other companies badly need in Japan, and needed here in this case, but a native English-speaking editor/proofreader. In many, if not most, cases, J-to-E translators here in Japan are Japanese folks with varying degrees of English capabilities, and any language-related company worth their stuff will also have native English speakers on staff to check their work and edit/rewrite it if necessary. Editing/Checking is all the more important if the translator was NOT a native English-speaker/writer, too.

But, alas… in my experience working as an editor/proofreader for now 10 years in Japan, a lot of companies here, through arrogant pride or lack of money (or both), skip the native check because they think they can do it better themselves. And out of this myopic boneheadedness is born a continuing stream of Japlish, (or Janglish, depending on your level of political correctness), and other drivel that passes off as “English” in Japan.

I still get a laugh, though, in the konbini when I see those packaged sandwiches, having gone from English to katakana and then back to pseudo “English”, all labeled as “Delicious Sand”. Mmm… Mmm…

These “english subtitles” in (almost) all japanese products reminds me of one-liners item descriptions in Crpgs…

Anyway, I heard (and, based on experience, agree with) that these slogans aren’t supposed to convey any information anyway… rather, they are as much an asthetic (“fashionable”) element as the colors and shapes in the product. Thus, the companies don’t really mind their “engrish” being completely off.

Anyway, my personal favorite is some paper that I own called “un-paper”.

Ron: point taken about translation vs. proofreading; I was just a bit careless myself! Of course, I’m not selling beer nationally.

Claus: yes, you’re spot-on. The English is just for decoration really. Still, you do want to get the decoration right….