Is a 2.8MB size Ebook Too LARGE for Dial-Up Customers?

Hi Sheila

I haven't heard of dial up for ages! I think you can safely assume most of your customers will be on broadband. Most sites nowadays you wouldn't even be able to view propely with dial up, it would be too slow. At a push, people could download 2.8 meg on dial up but again, I doubt you'll ever come across this now. As for me however, I still use a Zx spectrum, or if I need something a bit faster, a commodore 64. :-)

Phil

I use both High Speed and Dial up.

I find there is not much I can't do on my dial up connection and even choose it sometimes for downloading. I downloaded a 100 meg file the other day. (literally the whole DAY.)

If your ebook were something I wanted badly I'd download it.

OK here is the trick. Recommend to your dial up customers that they get "Free Download Manager" that is the actual name. Google it and provide the link to your customers.

It breaks large Downloads up into 4 segments, downloads them all at once and puts them back together into one file. I don't know how but it just does.

The beauty of it is that when, not if but when, the connection gets interrupted it will start where it left off and complete the download.

George Wright

George is spot on. The "Free Download Manager" is the way to go. Depending on dial-up
service 2.8mb can take 10-20 mins. I only use my dial-up when my broadband connection goes down.

I used dial up for years and it was hardly even a problem. If I remember right, Open Office was about a 6 hour download. I just set the computer not to go to sleep like me, started the download and turned in for the night.

If a download was up to an hour long, usually I would just do other things on the puter like writing while it was happening.

I agree, download time on dialup is probably around 20 minutes for that file size, so it's probably fine.

Having said that, if you can shrink the size of your ebook, that'd be good too.

Often it's really huge pictures that make the large size of the ebook. Can you shrink the picture size before you insert them into your PDF doc?

This can really cut down file sizes.

cheers
Sam

Mention the file size on the salespage so your customers know what to expect.


Andrew

BTW, if you have Adobe Acrobat Pro (or similar apps) you can optimize your PDFs. I do this with my ezines (I output them from the original graphics app as uncompressed PDFs and let Acrobat handle the crunching and final prep. They go from about 50 megs to under 2).

As for your original question, 2.8 megs is not horrible on dial-up; just a little patience is required. But see if the PDF can be further optimized, just for fun.

Hi,

I think you worry too much. the population of dialup users are but a very small fraction of the online community. Do not worry for the 1% and go ahead and target the 99%!

No, I don't think it's too large, my video file is around 65MB.

Why not tell your dial up customers that you can burn it to a CD and mail it to them? Doing it for free would be a nice touch but I think most people would pay a buck or two for the extra help.

Im on dial up also.My town is about 3,000 people in the hills and half the town is on dial up because of price.We have no choice but low and slow or fast and broke.
Anyway,i just downloaded that free ebook on the wordpress website setup.It is 5.6MB.about.
Took me 30 minutes at 7:00 pm tonight.Prime time for my town to be hogging the dial up service.
Any files between 1 to 2MB take about 10-15 minutes.
Ill see if i can ask my service provider how many dial up accounts they have,just for the Phoenix metro area.
I know quite a few peolpe in Phoenix on AOL dial up.
Aol has a large dial up customer base also.
But basiclly you should be fine.I would do as suggested and just let people know that on dial up it will take a few or extra minutes.
This will go a long way in customer trust and being truthfull.
I hate it [especially after i purchase something]and it wasnt disclosed it was a alarge file.One time i had to ask for a refund,there was just no way i could have done it.
But it was my fault i guess for not asking because it was videos.
I shoud have known better.

Wow, 2.8MB is two diskettes! (1.44 x 2)

With a size of only 2.8MB, I personally would not care how long it took someone to download it. That is a really small size. I've seen ebooks that were 25MB+ before. The fact is that most people nowadays have broadband and you can't worry about the people who don't. They are used to waiting for things anyway, I assure you.

I'm on a CDMA based connection which is a little better than dial-up. The average download/upload speed that I get is a Maximum of 20Kbps, in other words, very low. Even then I easily download large files (Many upto 200 MB) on my computer. No big trick but by simply using a download manager. You can get one Free at http://www.freedownloadmanager.org

This software downloads files Just like any other Peer to Peer software (Emule or Bittorrent). A 2.8MB file can be easily downloaded in 10 Minutes using this.

On your download page, tell your customers that If you're on DIALUP then download the ebook using a download manager (You can also Link directly to the download page for the same).
Bhupinder

2.8MB is not too big for dialup. Not many people have dialup these days so you have to with the majority.

In the past I have split books in to 1MB sections or even chapters which is another approach, or, as has been suggested, offer to send it on CD for a handling and shipping cost.

I have just produced an Audio Book version of my Paperback book, and is is 1.5GB.

I think most of the people is using now a days is DSL and broadbands, so it won't take so much time to download 2.8mb of file.
But it also depends on the location of the downloader and how fast can their connection can download. Here in the Philippines if the weather is bad the connection goes slow.

Aside from the quality reduction in PDF's and CD's you could also Zip the files to save a few more space..

I zipped a text only pdf of 74kb and it was reduced to 68kb a reduction of 6kb in size..

It's small but it will still help. Just mention an option for zipped files for download because some people might not have the necessary softwares to unzip (but windows have this as built in feature)

To your success!

oMar/Rapidscc

No it's not... I mean, you can download the file in around 15 mins on a 32kbps connection.

Thanks guys!! Awesome, yeah i remember when i had crappy dial up too...ugh....always getting booted off was the frustrating part, and that is what irritates people when downloading and then POOF!...you are now offline and must begin again...

but yeah, 15 min. is not too bad at all!!! Thanks guys makes me feel much much calmer and better about this whole thing....and so happy i was able to shrink it to under 1MB...NICE

Sheila

Being one that has dial-up only in my area of a total of 457 houses, No, 2.8mb is not too large for dial-up customers. As most have said and agree, it's just slow. I have downloaded products which were 20 times that large.

The things that really slow dial-ups down is images, audio, and videos. Video loads so slow on dial-up that I bypass them all. George Wright had a great suggestion... refer folks to "free download manager".

is the download manager you guys are talking about this one?

Free Download Manager - absolutely free download accelerator and manager or another one?

nevermind, the link was given above...this is the same YAY!!