I wish that beautiful 3-D rendered copy existed in real life. That cover is too beautiful not to be sitting on my desk.
It is a truly nice touch to see a technical book sweat the design details.
Discover Meteor
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Re: Discover Meteor
#12How many pages does the book have? Even with the discount: $30 is way too much for a tech book IMO. Maybe $20 would be doable.
If the information in the book (regardless of page count) gives you insight into a new technology that you can use to expand your career, is $30 really too much? If you're a contractor billing at market rates in SF, $30 is one-third to one-fifth of a single hour's income. Time to start valuing books based on knowledge contained rather than paper weight.
IF the information contained is proven to be valuable and well-expressed than yes, I agree, $39 (or even $99 or whatever) is totally worth it when the expertise derived pays off. BUT, for an unknown quantity it's still steep. There are plenty of poorly written tech books not really worth the "paper" they're printed on. So asking people to pony-up that kind of money is a little shocking. It might be better to provide (as they have) a sample chapter, and then split the book in parts. Then each part could be $X (say, $12?) which allows people to pay a smaller amount, ascertain the value the book provides and then shell out the full amount.
People are price-sensitive. Their expectations--derived from pricing observed for similar books--is that a book's "retail" price would be somewhere between $20-$30. A book that's nearly $40 is almost unheard of. Additionally, this is especially true for "self-published" books. We expect them to be cheaper because their distribution/production costs are cheaper (or at least we perceive them to be cheaper) and we acknowledge that often self-published books don't have expensive, but quality-assuring, intermediates like editors. In other words, a self-published book is a much greater unknown quantity than one from a publisher which has been edited etc. Plenty of books from publishers suck, but an even greater proportion of self-published books suck.
Re: Discover Meteor
#13I wish that beautiful 3-D rendered copy existed in real life. That cover is too beautiful not to be sitting on my desk. It is a truly nice touch to see a technical book sweat the design details.
Right now Meteor is changing so fast that a paper edition didn't really make sense (the online edition will be kept up to date, of course).
But once Meteor stabilizes at 1.0 we'll consider a printed version. And if we do this, we'll also provide a discount for people who have already bought the digital edition.
Re: Discover Meteor
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the information in the book (regardless of page count) gives you insight into a new technology that you can use to expand your career, is $30 really too much? If you're a contractor billing at market rates in SF, $30 is one-third to one-fifth of a single hour's income. Time to start valuing books based on knowledge contained rather than paper weight.
IF the information contained is proven to be valuable and well-expressed than yes, I agree, $39 (or even $99 or whatever) is totally worth it when the expertise derived pays off. BUT, for an unknown quantity it's still steep. There are plenty of poorly written tech books not really worth the "paper" they're printed on. So asking people to pony-up that kind of money is a little shocking. It might be better to provide…
I feel as though it is fair to note here that if you are not satisfied with this book, you are able to get a full refund for it. $39 may still be too much for a speculative buyer, but at least you aren't throwing away money if it's not up to your standards
Re: Discover Meteor
#15How many pages does the book have? Even with the discount: $30 is way too much for a tech book IMO. Maybe $20 would be doable.
How many pages? That's a weird metric.
Re: Discover Meteor
#16How many pages does the book have? Even with the discount: $30 is way too much for a tech book IMO. Maybe $20 would be doable.
The price is a complete non-issue for me.
For me, the issue is time: why should I spend time learning this framework, versus all the other frameworks that I see showing up a few times a week on HN?
If you convince me that my time is worth it, I'd pay $60 as easily as I'd pay $20.
Re: Discover Meteor
#17If there any upgrade pathes between the plans? Let say that I buy the starter plan, like the content and want to buy the plan with the videos. Should I pay the full price?
Re: Discover Meteor
#18I am so tired of the Goldilocks pricing model.
Re: Discover Meteor
#19If there any upgrade pathes between the plans? Let say that I buy the starter plan, like the content and want to buy the plan with the videos. Should I pay the full price?
Yes, you'll be able to upgrade. So the rational decision would be buying the cheapest plan and upgrading later. I just hope you're not rational… :)
Re: Discover Meteor
#20If there any upgrade pathes between the plans? Let say that I buy the starter plan, like the content and want to buy the plan with the videos. Should I pay the full price?
Yes, you'll be able to upgrade. So the rational decision would be buying the cheapest plan and upgrading later. I just hope you're not rational… :)
Unfortunately I am :-) Thank you for the reply.
Actually you should not fear rational people: if your content is good enough they will upgrade!