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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

#71

Post by chanux »

edw519 wrote: post #34

This is great! Raganwald is already one of my favorites, here and on twitter. I love to see stuff like this. I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next hour or two. Just a reminder, my ebook is free, too: html on my blog: http://edweissman.com/53640595 Or if you prefer a pdf, someone I don't even know (thank you, whoever you are) was kind enough to put one here: http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf

I created mobi and epub versions ( with your permission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564615 )

There might be people who like those formats :)

http://www.mediafire.com/?b736ucvz8rn7phu

PS: I read the book and gave it to a few friends too. Really good advices for life there. I think it's a must read for young, new programmers.

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

#72

Post by chanux »

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 got it for free too. I am not equipped with any online payment method yet (I know, it's already 2012 :( ). So I can only be very grateful to the author for making it possible for me to read it too.

Thank you Regenwald!

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

#73

Post by eric-hu »

peterarmstrong wrote: post #47
mruff wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was happy to pay the asking price if not more - stopped as soon as I had to use PayPal - dragged the slider to zero.

As a Leanpub co-founder, can you let me know which of the following would have worked for you: a) Google Checkout b) Amazon Checkout c) Credit card (via Stripe or similar)

My personal pref would be:

Amazon > Google = Stripe (I haven't used Stripe before and would be interested in the opportunity to try it out)

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

#74

Post by peterarmstrong »

Arelius wrote: post #65
peterarmstrong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, We'll look into the formatting issues in the Mobi version. A couple things: 1. Leanpub is not a "publisher" in the sense of having proofreaders, editors, etc. We're a website that authors can use to self-publish ebooks, including in-progress ebooks. Self-publishing an in-progress ebook lets you iterate based on feedback like this. 2. We have an unconditional 100% refund policy. So if you're unhappy with your purc…

The refund policy is pretty noble of you. Do you find that very many people actually ask for refunds? In particular, how about months down the line? How do you deal with refunds once the author has been paid, do you just deal with the costs yourself?

It's equals part noble and self-interested: ebooks cost us essentially nothing to ship, so why not refund them fully and unconditionally? It's the right thing to do. Also, people will buy more books if we remove the risk.

This is especially true since we're a self-publishing website and we exercise virtually no control over what we sell.

In terms of numbers, we've had thousands of purchases and only a handful of refunds. I think we've had about 10 or 15 refunds in total. (I do the refunds myself, manually, via PayPal's web interface.)

In terms of how we handle refunds with respect to the author: we subtract them from royalties. We pay royalties quarterly so we don't have issues about whether the author gets paid before a refund is requested -- if someone wants a refund they usually ask for it within a day of purchasing!

Now, we may be lucky here, in that the quality of books sold on Leanpub is pretty high, even though almost all the books are in-progress books that the author is iterating on. As we grow we may have more of an issue; who knows, someday we may even need to automate the refund process...

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

#75

Post by patio11 »

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…

I've mentioned a couple of times on HN, but just one more: increasing prices means you deal with less pathological customers. What does a pathological customer sound like? They get something for free and then want their money back.

They also feel as other people have a moral obligation to comport their business affairs to the specifications of the pathological customer, and this is a very nonreciprocal obligation, because pathological customers will do absolutely nothing to change their desired behaviors as a result of a business relationship.

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

#76

Post by rhizome »

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…

He wouldn't have made it free if he couldn't afford it, and we wouldn't have chosen free if we could have paid.

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

#77

Post by ramblerman »

edw519 wrote: post #34

This is great! Raganwald is already one of my favorites, here and on twitter. I love to see stuff like this. I guess I know what I'll be doing for the next hour or two. Just a reminder, my ebook is free, too: html on my blog: http://edweissman.com/53640595 Or if you prefer a pdf, someone I don't even know (thank you, whoever you are) was kind enough to put one here: http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.pdf

Wow, what a great resource edw519. Thank you for writing this.

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

#78

Post by fmx »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #45

> (we won't spam you, we promise) It's a nice touch, but honestly, it just reminds me to use a wildcard.

It's great that Leanpub makes it so easy to register, but it would be even better if you didn't have to. I don't want to provide my email address to download a file. I used a disposable one and I'm sure some others did, too. That's just going to add (a tiny bit of) work for the Leanpub email server and make their stats look a little better than they really are.

Also, the site creating a "profile" for me when all I did was download a book makes me feel "sucked in" a little. I know, rationally, that there's really no downside to it for me, but I still can't shake the feeling that this is more than I agreed to.

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

#79

Post by pgeorgi »

StavrosK wrote: post #61
peterarmstrong wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good feature; we'll add this to our queue. Thanks!

I'll second that. I think a post-pay model is really useful. The only problem is getting people to come back to pay for the thing.

Combine it with other features (Write the author, discuss the book with author and readers, rate the book) and invite the reader on the last page of the book.

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

#80

Post by pgeorgi »

StavrosK wrote: post #61
peterarmstrong wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good feature; we'll add this to our queue. Thanks!

I'll second that. I think a post-pay model is really useful. The only problem is getting people to come back to pay for the thing.

Combine it with other features (Write the author, discuss the book with author and readers, rate the book) and invite the reader on the last page of the book.
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