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Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

leanpub.com

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Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#21

Post by billpatrianakos »

raganwald wrote: post #6
billpatrianakos wrote: post #2

I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me a…

I only have one vote, but I think it’s meaningful in this case :-) If you’re in no position to pay for it, I want you to have it for free, and I’m glad that you went ahead and read it. If you do find it helpful, that would make me very happy. This is a book I’ve already written, so it’s a sunk cost for me... It’s all blog posts that others have found useful or meaningful in their search for decent work with decent pe…

Thank you for understanding. I know things will pick up and I promise to buy a copy when they do. I hope one day I can repay the favor. Of course you didn't set out to really do anyone Any favors here but it certainly feels like it. Thanks for the book. I am reading right now and I'm glad I got it.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#23

Post by peterarmstrong »

brd wrote: post #3
billpatrianakos wrote: post #2

I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me a…

I agree with you on the guilt evoked by the site design. I immediately second guessed whether or not it was worth downloading and ultimately decided I would be willing to pay if it proved valuable. I reviewed the table of contents and saw the chapter "The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career" so I decided to download it. I skimmed the chapter, decided it wasn't worth my money, de…

We don't want violent reactions of guilt; sorry about that :( There is enough guilt in life. Please don't feel any because of Leanpub.

What we were going for was more of a "little nudge", if you have the disposable income. That's why the slider goes from a pastel green to a neutral "meh" grey (instead of a red, which would make you feel bad) when you go lower, and to a nicer, darker green as you go higher.

On second thought, I guess if we wanted to be evil about this we could have some graphic where you have a dinner plate full of food, and as you lower the slider you're removing side dishes (and say if you go free then the entree goes too), and if you raise the slider you add say a glass of wine, a dessert, etc -- now that would be a fun design to A/B test :)

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#25

Post by peterarmstrong »

leviathan wrote: post #22

I wish there was a regular credit card payment option. As it stands, due to brain dead PayPal policies, I cannot use PayPal from the country I'm in, and I would really like to pay for the book.

This is in our queue. Unfortunately for us, since we're in Canada we can't use Stripe yet, or we may have already done this...

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#26

Post by jgeralnik »

pgrote wrote: post #7
billpatrianakos wrote: post #2

I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me a…

Yes. Typically, when someone makes their creation available for free with an optional donation, I will donate a few dollars to encourage other content creators to do the same. It is odd, though. I am not so much supporting or applauding the specific content creator, but more encouraging future ones to make their payments sliding or optional. For instance, I buy every Humble Bundle that comes out, but have never playe…

I feel the same way. Pretty much the only things I buy online are those offered for free, in an effort to support content creators who use such a scheme.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#28

Post by peterarmstrong »

Mz wrote: post #17

I just tried to get it. I am on a tablet and all attempts to download it have failed. I will chime in and note that I am in pretty dire straits financially (homeless and my freelance work recently fell through -- I am pretty up a creek) and was very concerned it was going to charge me. The means to request it is not very clear in that regard.

We just doubled our number of web servers to handle the massive HN traffic today, so please try again. If you have any issues downloading please email hello@leanpub.com.

Re: Raganwald's "How to Do What You Love" is free today

#29

Post by xinsight »

fyi - Trying to read the epub file in ibooks and i get this error:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty error on line 1 at column 1: Encoding error

Update: PDF works, but requires a lot of scrolling on the iphone.

Also, it's a 40 page "book".

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