The trick is to make the most out of the technology and the platform

Apr 8, 2013 09:52 GMT  ·  By

BitTorrent was invented as a way of efficiently and quickly distributing large files over the internet. To that end, it's been a huge success, the technology invented more than a decade ago now makes up a big percentage of internet traffic.

Digital books though have never been that big, even the most elaborate are a few MB, easily stored and distributed via more traditional server/client setups rather than peer-to-peer technologies, like BitTorrent.

Yet, BitTorrent – the company – is now wooing authors, trying to get them to use BitTorrent as a publishing medium.

Not BitTorrent – the technology, though that's obviously involved, but rather the official BitTorrent client, uTorrent, as a distribution platform.

A few months ago, author Tim Ferriss promoted his latest book, The 4-Hour Chef, published via Amazon, through BitTorrent.

A package containing some chapters from the book and some additional material was put together and distributed as ad to uTorrent users. It was a massive success, if only because of its efficiency.

The book sold 250,000 copies with the help of BitTorrent with only two million people actually downloading the promotional ad package.

That alone is impressive and should be an indication of the power uTorrent ads can have. But that's just part of the story.

The reason the campaign was so successful was that it had been designed with the internet in mind.

The samples included in the torrent were self-sufficient and were interesting and useful on their own. There was a lot of material beyond the book as well.

This free content spurred people to want to buy the book since they could see for themselves that it would be useful.

BitTorrent has now published a guide of sorts, discussing the success of Tim Ferriss' book, but also how anyone could replicate it. You won't be able to do it by simply running an ad in uTorrent, but there are some very valuable lessons in there.