The Hay Festival website, which offers podcasts of some of its readings, has recorded only 2,056 downloads in the past ten months, reports David Robinson in The Scotsman.

Apparently Christopher Hitchens is more popular than other writers, including Anna Politkovskaya, Martin Amis and Margaret Atwood.

"At the moment, Hay's English archive only has 59 of the 1,000-plus recorded talks available for download at £1 a time."

"The smaller (and free, but not downloadable) archive at Edinburgh International Festival's website (www.edbookfest.co.uk) which also features the last three writers, has comparable numbers of users."

25,000 people downloaded a series of podcasts of Alexander McCall Smith reading that were posted on scotsman.com, the newspaper's Web site.