I seriously cannot wait for this book to arrive in the mail.
The last book I spent reading entirely online was the Harry Potter Deathly Hollows leak. 700 crappy photos of pages ;p (I bought 2 copies of the book too, I don't feel I've done anything wrong).
I imagine that Rowling would sell her manuscript to US publishers in an auction house before putting her work on sale globally.
Who knows? She probably make a few million dollars on the low side and much more if the US publishers are real crazy about it.
Heck, this lead to a premises of my next novel(for the moment, I am writing a novel on a bunch of subversive robots). An American publisher/pirate decides to get into the mechanical computer business. He purchased an invention from a mother of an inventor and proceed to violate the inventor's patent by selling it to the average UK consumer, and then the world, ushering in the computer revolution.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_M...
Written by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Eliezer
If you are reading this Conrad, congrats! The book looks great and seems very well received.
I'm curious, does a "slashdotting" create a noticeable blip in traffic or book sales anymore?
His post announcing the book is at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1836935