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And I'm afraid at that point, I caved and ordered a paperback copy of American Gods from Amazon. Time was running out on the online version, I was getting laptop bruising, and my husband was convinced I was going cross-eyed. I had to finish the book, but I knew I wasn't going to do it online.

For all the whinging about the limitations of the free digital version of American Gods, Gaiman reported on his journal (journal.neilgaiman.com) in March that its weekly book sales had risen by 300%. Successful then, as a promotional exercise, and HarperCollins has presumably learned lots about how to provide an eBook.

It's complicated. If you want writers to keep writing novels they have to be paid for their output. But if stunts like the American Gods promotion and Radiohead's In Rainbows pay-what-you-like model prove anything, it's that the old fixed-price capitalist model is being subverted and challenged in ways that, for the consumer, are really quite exhilarating.