Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$250k books sold, to save lives

sive.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 54 posts

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#11

Post by jbc1 »

moreaccountspls wrote: post #8

It's a bit sad that you've taken a wonderful, altruistic act and cheapened it by feeling the need to broadcast it on the internet :(

Charitable acts being lessened by others learning about them is possibly the most harmful widespread opinion that exists today.

Your comment makes it less likely that others will broadcast their charitable giving, result in less people being prompted to give, and overall reduce the amount of giving in the world; all for no gain for yourself or anyone else. You want "a bit sad"? Dwell on that for a while.

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#12

Post by hypersundays »

obilgic wrote: post #2

$250k is the revenue? if he wired the whole thing, who covered the costs?

He has a blog post on the site about the approach he took.

Instead of going to Penguin to get his book published, he decided to try doing the whole process himself. That included getting translations done, coordinating printing, building a webstore, etc.

It's pretty cool tbh

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#13

Post by Karupan »

moreaccountspls wrote: post #8

It's a bit sad that you've taken a wonderful, altruistic act and cheapened it by feeling the need to broadcast it on the internet :(

People broadcast what they ate for breakfast! Doing the same when you have donated (any amount of money) doesn’t lessen it in any way.

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#14

Post by cheez »

shric wrote: post #3
obilgic wrote: post #2

$250k is the revenue? if he wired the whole thing, who covered the costs?

Based on https://sive.rs/m and https://sive.rs/n he's self-publishing electronically for $15 (or $4 more for paperback), so I guess the costs are quite small.

My guess is that he's trying to see if he can do bookbaby.com

edit: wow that actually exists haha

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#16

Post by grativo »

hypersundays wrote: post #12
obilgic wrote: post #2

$250k is the revenue? if he wired the whole thing, who covered the costs?

He has a blog post on the site about the approach he took. Instead of going to Penguin to get his book published, he decided to try doing the whole process himself. That included getting translations done, coordinating printing, building a webstore, etc. It's pretty cool tbh

This is very true, in his about me page, he says that he does not rely on any type of cloud and hosts through his own servers. A very unique approach indeed.

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#17

Post by camgunz »

Thank you for doing this. I once knew a guy who said it should be your goal to give over a third of your lifetime earnings to charity (I think it was a third, somewhere between 10% and 50%) and this reminded me instantly of that. Great to read about something super positive in these times.

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#19

Post by moreaccountspls »

Karupan wrote: post #13
moreaccountspls wrote: post #8

It's a bit sad that you've taken a wonderful, altruistic act and cheapened it by feeling the need to broadcast it on the internet :(

People broadcast what they ate for breakfast! Doing the same when you have donated (any amount of money) doesn’t lessen it in any way.

It lessens it for the author because they're looking for validation from someone in some type of way, the same way the breakfast people do. If you're content being someone that needs validation from other people for your actions, then sure, it doesn't lessen it for them.

Re: $250k books sold, to save lives

#20

Post by gkoberger »

renewiltord wrote: post #18

Interesting. This baselines the cost of one life to $2000 effectively. So I could trade two lives for a top of the line Macbook Pro. Buy an SF home for 500 lives. I spend one human life to live in SF every month. Huh.

I get your point, but don't be too down on yourself. Nobody is running around the Against Malaria Foundation saying "quick, buy 125,000 more nets!". Rather, they take in money, and they assign something tangible (in this case, a net that's extrapolated to a life) to each donation so it feels a bit more connected.

This isn't to even remotely take away from what Derek did – I've been a fan for years, and this was one of the coolest blog posts I've read in a long time. It's the opposite... I just don't want anyone to feel like they're killing someone every time they pay rent.

Post reply on HN