Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#21

Post by mikecane » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:14 PM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.

I don't know what your ad income is -- and I'm not asking -- but just looking at the HowIDidIt page, this is a book that screams for you to redo it for the iPad in iBooks Author. It's exactly the kind of book that app was made for.

EDIT: And btw, eBooks are my thing, so you really should listen and do it. "The Classic Back in Print for the Tablet (or iPad) Age."

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#22

Post by antidoh » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:18 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #9

TamDenholm wrote: post #8

I've always wanted to see the entire library of haynes manuals put online or even in an ipad/iphone app. This looks a bit like a proof of concept to it. Perhaps the OP could approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example?

>approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example? This is the correct answer. At least try and get a friend to do it, and take a cut. The idea of being able to flick through all the haynes manuals on an ipad is brilliant. And I don't even like cars.

Question to motorheads:

Would you use a shop manual exclusively on an (your) ipad?

Or would you prefer to have a paper copy, so that you don't get your ipad greasy and scratched while you're working on a car?

Question to everyone: when are we going to have devices that are cheap and rugged enough that my first question doesn't matter?

Edit: If that ever happens, they won't be sold by Apple, the company that made unboxing a fetish.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#23

Post by darkxanthos » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

thoughtcriminal wrote: post #12

Cool experiment. I thought about doing something like this myself. Maybe a remix of classic books under the public domain to create a new work with a contemporary message. Maybe then publish it online and monetize it via Adsense (although I'm not a big fan of that business model). Instead, I decided to share a personal finance hack I developed called the No Budget Budget: https://leanpub.com/nobudgetbudget/ and sell…

Your link doesn't work for me.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#24

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.

I'd go on https://leanpub.com/ and turn it into an ebook.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#25

Post by braveheart1723 » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:25 PM UTC

this is great, actual useful content with great illustrations. It's refreshing to see something with some practical use.

Growing up I remember being obsessed with this: DK The Way Things Work. it was an amazing mac CD ROM with illustrations of everyday things broken down, with moving parts and all...

Probably one of the reason i became an engineer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Work-CD-ROM-Version-1-0-mac/dp/...

Horrible Youtube video ( best i could find... ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4MIVU5i_xE

Cannot recommend it enough for kids. They don't make em like they used to :D

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#26

Post by thoughtcriminal » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:27 PM UTC

darkxanthos wrote: post #23

thoughtcriminal wrote: post #12

Cool experiment. I thought about doing something like this myself. Maybe a remix of classic books under the public domain to create a new work with a contemporary message. Maybe then publish it online and monetize it via Adsense (although I'm not a big fan of that business model). Instead, I decided to share a personal finance hack I developed called the No Budget Budget: https://leanpub.com/nobudgetbudget/ and sell…

Your link doesn't work for me.

Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#27

Post by rubyrescue » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:28 PM UTC

AlexMuir wrote: post #2

I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I leave it to stew for 2013.

you have starter pictures on the cooling page. otherwise, i love this - i'll show it to my kids!

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#28

Post by AlexMuir » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:28 PM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #6

Questions: Why are there comments on the page? How difficult would it be to compile it into an ebook and make it available on kindle/itunes/wherever else? Seems like you'd only need to make a couple of sales for it to compete with the adsense income. Maybe have it so if the visitor has read 3 or more consecutive pages it shows up with an ebook splash page, "advert free and easy to read blah blah blah"

I put in the comments because I thought it'd be an easy way of adding some content for free as people add to the information already there, and also to let people moan about errors so that I can then go in and fix them. Comments are a fairly low-maintenance feedback system, especially with Disqus dealing with the spam filtering for me.

An eBook is a great idea. I just worry that the information is slightly out of date for people to actually pay for it. I know virtually nothing about ebook formats so this would be quite a learning curve for me. I'll bear it in mind though. I could realistically see 200 x $5 sales per year, which isn't to be sneezed at.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#29

Post by JonnieCache » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:32 PM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #17

JonnieCache wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find. http://schema.org type of stuff. You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.

Is there any evidence that this actually affects SEO or rankings?

Wikipedia is a perfect storm of pagerank so unless google have specifically made an exception for it, links from there must be pretty valuable. IANASEO.

Re: Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website

#30

Post by AlexMuir » Thu, Dec 27, 2012, 6:38 PM UTC

jessepollak wrote: post #10

Just a thought: I might consider a different monetization strategy than AdSense. The ads really look awful and make the site seem significantly less 'quality' than it actually is. I might experiment with some sort of freemium model; maybe for free you could get the first half of sections for every chapter and then you can pay ~$5 to get access to everything. Or, as someone above mentioned, compile it into an ebook an…

You are right, the ads look absolutely shit - I could perhaps go with Buysellads when traffic picks up.

Interesting idea - I'm a huge admirer of things that follow that model - Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and Avdi Grimm's Object's On Rails.

I am hoping that people fixing cars are more transactional (read likely to click an ad) than people looking for coding tutorials. I might leave it as ads for six months and then try six months of freemium access and compare the two.