Interestingly, at Google the situation with Kasparov and rooms was :
(1) Big rooms were very, very hard to reserve, and staff was constantly making them unavailable to us. Besides that, the window of time when the author is coming is usually very narrow.
(2) Googlers could watch from their desks, so you didn't have to go in person
(3) Even if you did go in person, you wouldn't get a free book (to get it autographed). In the early days, they did give out free books
(4) And besides that you didn't get a free book, you couldn't buy one, either, because Books, Inc. stopped coming with a box of books to sell. They weren't making enough money that way.
The net of 2, 3, 4 was that in-person attendance was less valuable.
(5) Very, very few celebrities could fill up Charlie's, the big cafeteria, that holds 400. I don't think he could.
(5) I got a room that holds 100 people for Kasparov, one of the larger ones available
(1) Big rooms were very, very hard to reserve, and staff was constantly making them unavailable to us. Besides that, the window of time when the author is coming is usually very narrow.
(2) Googlers could watch from their desks, so you didn't have to go in person
(3) Even if you did go in person, you wouldn't get a free book (to get it autographed). In the early days, they did give out free books
(4) And besides that you didn't get a free book, you couldn't buy one, either, because Books, Inc. stopped coming with a box of books to sell. They weren't making enough money that way.
The net of 2, 3, 4 was that in-person attendance was less valuable.
(5) Very, very few celebrities could fill up Charlie's, the big cafeteria, that holds 400. I don't think he could.
(5) I got a room that holds 100 people for Kasparov, one of the larger ones available
(6) He complained that the room was too small