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Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

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Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#72
Honest question- why does one choose to harvest emails for something like this vs just putting ads on the page? I have seen this model used for several ebooks, but it seems like long term its much more viable to just make the content widely available and put adwords on it or something similar.

Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#74

Thank you! I've been following your Twitter feed for a while and having all this in a single ebook is amazing.

I downloaded the book, and the size can be reduced slightly with pdfsizeopt.

I don't have any of the extended filters, but it is a small size reduction with the default load:

  $ ./pdfsizeopt next-level-database-techniques-for-developers.pdf
  ...
  info: generated object stream of 7399 bytes in 224 objects (9%)
  info: generated 387518 bytes (89%)

  $ stat -c '%s %n' next*.pdf
  435483 next-level-database-techniques-for-developers.pdf
  387518 next-level-database-techniques-for-developers.pso.pdf

Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#75
post #72

Honest question- why does one choose to harvest emails for something like this vs just putting ads on the page? I have seen this model used for several ebooks, but it seems like long term its much more viable to just make the content widely available and put adwords on it or something similar.

If you ever want to release an update or launch a new product or book, you can now communicate directly with those who are already interested in your work.

Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#76
I get the frustration about the email, but that aside, I do wonder whether requiring the email before getting the book is the most effective mechanism for your end goal. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to maximize the number of people subscribed? Do you want to create a community? Why do you want these things? Do you want to share your knowledge?

Having no email-wall would probably result in fewer registrations. But I do wonder if you had all the pages available -- meaning they would be indexed by Google and show up in search results -- with a subscribe to my newsletter button, if that would have a comparable number of registrations because you would have more people seeing the button? And they might be potentially higher quality registrations, too, if you want a community.

If your end goal is to share your knowledge then making the entire book public is probably the better option.

In short I'm just confused what the goal of the email-wall is!

Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#78
post #72

Honest question- why does one choose to harvest emails for something like this vs just putting ads on the page? I have seen this model used for several ebooks, but it seems like long term its much more viable to just make the content widely available and put adwords on it or something similar.

long term value of an email is far greater than ads, especially for a developer audience that has probably 90% ad block usage rate

Re: Show HN: I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks

#80
post #49
post #2

In isolation because of Corona last year, I started to share many lesser-known database tricks I know on Twitter (@tobias_petry). Although I thought that only a few people would be interested in something like this, it became a matter of course over the months. Meanwhile, thousands follow me to read my database tips or news. Since every message in the constant social media stream vanishes after a few days, I had to d…

Gmail now started to classify the email with the ebook attachment as spam. After having worked without any problems before. I am now changing my code, give me a few minutes. Fixed

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