41–50 of 88 posts
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.
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 think you have the best reason to take the author up on his offer. You cannot purchase it. He offers you a way to get it for free. That's a good match.
For me, I came to that site lead by the title. I like raganwald's contribution here and expected something like a free 'Learn Python the hard way' style thing. Or a blog-articles-in-pdf. With maybe little (publishing!) effort and just a heads-up for the people here.[1]
Seeing that it is actually a book in progress I left. I cannot pay for purely technical reasons (No credit card, this country doesn't want to give me one and my home country revoked mine when they didn't see any incoming salary for roughly a year). But I earn a pretty damn good salary here and got money in the bank. So _I_ would need to feel guilty for free-loading if I just grabbed the book.
You really shouldn't. And good luck anyway.
Edit: 1: Actually, after rereading raganwald's comment I think that is pretty much correct. But the site says 'Note: You are buying an Alpha Book. New essays will be added on a regular basis, and you will receive updates for free.' so I don't understand how this 'sunk costs' works in this case?
>Your résumé would look better on top of a funding proposal than under a cover letter.
It's a nice touch, but honestly, it just reminds me to use a wildcard.
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 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.
Was happy to pay the asking price if not more - stopped as soon as I had to use PayPal - dragged the slider to zero.
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 love his type of content publishing. It works the same way as the Humble Bundles. If you give something away for free, I'll take it for free. If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me a reasonable suggested price(this book), I'll pay the suggested price. If you give me the option to pay $0, show me what others are paying(humble bundle), I'll pay the median. If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me "b…
I actually didn't download it at all because of that. A free book to throw on my Kindle and maybe look through on a slower day is great but setting the price to zero felt like ripping off someone who contributes to HN and spoiling his metrics. I bookmarked it though so there's some gain from this tactic.
This motivated me to publish a book I'm finishing under the same model.
However, the publisher has not done its job here. I'm reading the Mobi version on Kindle for iPhone, and the constant formatting errors make it difficult to follow the text. This includes missing punctuation, missing indentation on blockquotes that make it impossible to see where the quote ends, random font changes in and out of a monospace font, random spacing around headers, and the lack of a table of contents.
If you want to call a collection of blog posts a "book" and ask for money for it, you need to at least proofread your output files and make sure basic standards of copy-editing hold. As it stands I will avoid buying from Leanpub in the future.