Not if he outsourced the reading of said book to a foreign company. He would would have to check if their reading was the same as his every hour for 18 months that would have taken him 3 days to read it himself. Slowly.

I used to leave copies of Mythical Man Month on the seats of the MUNI in SF during the DotCom era. Also PeopleWare. Actually Patti Dunn gave me a few hundred extra copies of PeopleWare from some Barclays event I accidentally attended and I couldn't conveniently get them home on my bike, so that was a one-time event.

I so enjoyed the pragmatism of Crockford's "Javascript: the good parts" that I gave it away for a while too.

Sometimes I would print out great tracts like "big ball of mud" and leave them at appropriate places in SF.

Eventually I realized I was either preaching to the converted or preaching to the wilderness. So I stopped. But you've inspired me to reconsider anonymous viral software evangelism, at least for a brief moment.