
The economics of a web-based book - _dps
http://practicaltypography.com/economics-year-one.html
======
patio11
I'd suggest, if you want to run publishing on niche business topics as a
business, that you take a page out of the Nathan Barry / Brennan Dunn / et al
formula. (There exist many others who do similar things, but they're locally
recognizable examples of it.)

Trade the book, or some other incentive [+], for the customer's email address.
Attention is fleeting, but relationships with one's email list are enduring,
if you do them correctly.

Send people who give you their email address lots of valuable stuff for free.
Then, ask them to buy your products. Charge an appropriate amount for those
products.

The math is, as has been widely reported by people writing books/etc on HN
about a wide range of niche business topics, _quite attractive_. (Ballpark
numbers? 650k people with some level of interaction with an online version of
the book implies probably between 20k and 50k folks who would have been happy
to swap their email address for a downloadable version. That's basically a
nice house which temporarily happens to exist inside of an e.g. Mailchimp
account.)

[+] I will note the author appears to have aesthetic reasons to reject
creating a PDF/e-book/etc version of the book, despite people literally
offering him money to do so. [http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-
book-or-pdf....](http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-
pdf.html) There _must be_ something which adds incremental value to the book
which would justify incremental closeness to a portion of the readers.

~~~
nathanbarry
First, I want to congratulate Matthew on creating a truly valuable resource
that people love and are learning from. That's the hardest part of any online
business. Typography for Lawyers and Practical Typography are great resources
that deserve every bit of praise and attention they've received.

Whenever someone creates something this valuable I like to see that they get
paid for their work. After all, the only thing better than creating products
and content people love, is getting paid to do it.

Based on my experience Practical Typography could, without too much effort,
make $100,000 per year. So you can think of this comment as a short article
titled:

"How Matthew Butterick could have made 27x as much revenue from Practical
Typography"

Let's jump in.

// The numbers

Matthew quotes a few numbers in his post, but the two I want to focus on are
traffic (649,000 readers, actually I'm not sure if this means visits or
visitors...) and book revenue ($3676).

My blog actually averages a similar amount of traffic. For the last two years
I've had about 660,000 visits from 420,000 visitors. So about the same amount
of traffic. This includes plenty of lower quality viral traffic from
communities like Hacker News.

I wrote three books [1] and each one of them made $100,000 within their first
year (roughly). That tells me with the same amount of traffic—which is
probably better targeted than mine—it's reasonable that Matthew could make
$100,000 off of one book.

That's 27x times as much revenue as he actually made ($3676). What I find most
interesting is that increasing revenue by 27x actually comes down to three
simple changes.

// #1: Have a price

If the first rule of making money selling products is to actually have a
product, then the second is to have a price.

Donations are nice, but you won't get nearly the same results as if you
actually had a price for the product.

Now having a price doesn't mean you can't offer the book for free to readers.
Michael Hartl gives aways his excellent Rails Tutorial [2] book for free, but
charges for the PDF version and extra content. Pat Flynn [3] gave away his
LEED Exam study guide for free online and charged for the same content
packaged up as an ebook.

I can't share Michael's exact revenue numbers, but he makes a healthy salary
from a book he shares for free online. Pat Flynn made over $500,000 in a few
years of sales from his LEED certification study guide.

They both gave away their content for free, but unlike Practical Typography,
add a price to a version of the product.

// #2: Build an email list

649,000 readers don't mean that much if you can't contact them. I've had
plenty of posts that get 50,000 visits in a day, but then the week there is no
difference in my business. Traffic is fleeting, viral traffic is just a flash
in the pan.

You need a way to push new content and products to your audience, so they have
to subscribe in some way. That means Facebook, Twitter, RSS, YouTube, Email,
etc.

I'll just cut to the chase: email has the highest engagement and drives the
most sales. Often seeing 10-15x the value of other channels [4].

To get email subscribers add an opt-in form to each page on your site giving
away an incentive related to the content. In your case that could be a free
font, a typography cheat-sheet, or additional lessons. It doesn't have to be a
hard sell or seem spammy at all. Just say, "if you liked this content you'll
also like... enter your email so I can send it to you."

Then give them an option to opt-in to a free follow-up course on Typography.
Keep sending them valuable information and you'll build a loyal following that
is happy to read your emails each week or month.

// #3: Setup automated sales pitches

That free email course should be dripping out free training every few days or
once a week. After demonstrating plenty of value work a sales pitch into one
of the emails. Simply describe the additional resources you've created or the
benefits of getting the content in a specific format and ask them to purchase.

Then your next email should be educational content again. An email or two
later you can work in another soft sell.

Since email courses are timed to when each subscriber joins, you'll have
automated sales pitches going out to each of your subscribers on the perfect
schedule. Effectively doing a mini product launch to just a few people each
day—except that you don't have to do any work other than set it up.

Then later on in the sequence put in links to your fonts and other products.
Having an email list is especially powerful when you have multiple products
(as you do). Automated selling for the win!

Patio11 has a great course on this [5]. You can learn a ton just from reading
the sales page.

Even if you don't want to charge for your product—which I think would be a
huge mistake—you can still put in a request for a donation in one of the
automated messages.

// Good authors should make money

Authors not making money from their work is a huge problem. It's frustrating
to see someone put out such good content and not be able to make a living from
it. Especially when the hard part is writing a great book, and it just takes a
few techniques to actually make a living from it. This problem bothers me so
much I actually wrote an entire book, Authority [6], to try and solve it.

It's also frustrating to see authors not be able to contact their readers, so
I built ConvertKit [7] (email marketing for authors) to solve that problem.

Matthew, I'd love to see you get paid for your work. You deserve it. All these
ideas can be implemented now and I bet you'll see great results over the next
12 months.

If you ever want to talk, email me at myfirstname[at]convertkit[dot]com

\--------------

[1] [http://nathanbarry.com/books/](http://nathanbarry.com/books/) [2]
[http://railstutorial.org](http://railstutorial.org) [3]
[http://smartpassiveincome.com](http://smartpassiveincome.com) [4]
[https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-
worth/](https://convertkit.com/2013/email-subscriber-worth/) [5]
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-
emails](https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails) [6]
[http://nathanbarry.com/authority](http://nathanbarry.com/authority) [7]
[http://convertkit.com](http://convertkit.com)

~~~
madrobby
I've made $60k in a year with a highly topical 60-page ebook (PDF only) that I
wrote in about a week, mainly by promoting to a mailing list with only a few
thousand people on it.

As Nathan says, you need to set a price. Plus, tell people why it's worth more
for them to buy and read your book than to either not have the information in
it, or spend the time researching themselves.

My book is on supporting Retina screens on web browsers[1]. Yes, you can spend
a week reading all you can ok the web about it. Or you spend $49 and know all
about it in half an hour and spend the other 39 1/2 hours of the week making
money with client work.

[1] [http://retinafy.me](http://retinafy.me)

~~~
porter
So you got about 1,200 sales out of a list of 3,000 subscribers? Would you
mind sharing your exact conversion rate (total # of sales/total # of
subscribers) that made you $60k in revenue from this book?

------
falcolas
Dear Author,

I read (parts) of your book, and didn't pay. Why? Because it was an
interesting diversion, not something I was actually interested in. If it had
been locked behind a paywall, it would not have affected my life in any
meaningful way. It was merely, for better or worse, a pleasant diversion,
drifting in a sea full of diversions.

I don't imagine that I am in any way alone in this. Looking at your numbers,
I'd say that your 2-300 paying people are the true readership and audience of
your book; the rest of us were there for a diversion; because it was another
blue link in a sea of blue links.

Don't take this as a negative sign. Typography is necessarily a niche field,
and at the least, you've introduced over 600,000 new people to typography. It
might not help you now, but if even 0.01% of those 600,000 start investing
time and money into typography, well, it's more impact you would have had if
the content had been hidden behind a paywall. Cold comfort for sure, but in
the age of browsers, typography is a dying art. New blood should always be
welcome.

Sincerely, Falcolas

~~~
abandonliberty
You are right. Content is devalued due to abundance and us being a product.
I'm sure a lot of us think the same way.

I would challenge us: What value do did we get out of it?

A dollar? $.50? $.10? $.01?

What we support grows. What relationship do we want with content? Do we want
advertisers to control everything?

$.10 per casual view madly alters the equation.

Sadly, solutions like Flattr aren't gaining any traction.

~~~
ersii
I was going to donate 5$ or 10$, as I found the whole experiment and write up
worth it - especially since the content was available for the masses to pique
their interests.

I was unfortunately unable to so through Amazon Payments, as they only accept
payments from US citizens at this moment. And I do not want/like to use
Paypal.

------
ef4
"What’s most in­ter­est­ing to me, how­ever, is that so many more read­ers
were will­ing to buy a font li­cense (at $59–299) than to make a do­na­tion
(at $5–10). Don’t get me wrong—I’m ut­terly grate­ful. But it’s
coun­ter­in­tu­itive: I never ex­pected that the cheaper op­tion would be so
much less pop­u­lar. Econ­o­mists, I in­vite your explanations."

This is not surprising to me at all. There are multiple reasons why the font
sale is easier to make.

The whole book is an excellent sales pitch for the fonts. It's hard to believe
you didn't design it that way, because you did everything right. You establish
credibility as an expert. You give the reader a gift of useful information.
You explain at length the value of the product. You even help the reader see
herself as someone who's savvy enough to buy the product (copy like: "You are
not apathetic" in the Times New Roman page.)

So you have a great sales pitch for the fonts. Whereas the donation suffers in
comparison. There's no quid pro quo -- I understand you see the book itself as
the value they'd be paying for, but that value is already in the past by the
time they're deciding to donate. It changes the psychology.

Also, plenty of people can plunk down a company card to buy a font (or a
book). It's a legitimate business expense that's easy to justify. It can be
much harder to justify a "donation" to a random author on the internet. For
this reason alone, you'd be better off changing "donation" to an e-book sale,
even if the e-book is just the same content as the website.

~~~
Kronopath
I've recommended this book to many many people in the past, but still haven't
gotten around to paying anything for it, largely for the reasons you mention.
I looked at his options for payment, and they ranged from "buy one of my
fonts", which was tempting but expensive, to "buy _Typography for Lawyers_ ",
which I wasn't interested in because I'm not a lawyer, to "donate to me",
which felt like I was getting nothing in return.

I'd gladly pay $10-15 for a DRM-free ebook version of this book, even if it's
the exact same content as the one online, since I can keep it with me on my
mobile devices and be sure that even if the site one day goes down I still own
and can read the book.

Or hell, since the author apparently has objections to e-book file formats and
closed platforms[0], then give me a clean downloadable desktop version of the
website as static HTML or something. Or an app version of the book which is
just static HTML wrapped in a web view. Anything along those lines would be
fine, as long as I can view it offline and keep it past the point when the
author stops paying for his server.

[0] [http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-
pdf....](http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.html)

~~~
vram22
Great points, worth keeping in mind by wannabe authors.

------
_dps
I thought this may be of interest to HN since the author posts here
occasionally and there has been past discussion of his book/typesetting
framework [0].

I personally found "Butterick's Practical Typography" very compelling, and I
happily paid for it (apparently well above the median selling price!). I'm a
little disappointed to read that Mr. Butterick has only made something less
than $15k over the course of the first year; while he seems cheerful about it
in the post, I can't imagine that such a payout comes close to covering his
opportunity cost for creating a high quality book.

Economic structures that support high-quality open-access content seem to be
an ongoing challenge with no clear answers.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7822057)

~~~
superusermind
Thanks for posting this. The online version of Practical Typography is a
beautiful presented and handy guide, and I was surprised to see it available
for free.

~~~
a3n
> My pol­icy for Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy was sim­ple: read­ing the book
> would re­quire no pre­pay­ment. ... Call it an honor sys­tem. I’ve never
> used the term free to de­scribe the book, be­cause I don’t see it that way.

The book is not free, it's just that the seller leaves it up to you when to
pay for it. He's experimenting with a payment protocol different than the one
that most of us have used for thousands of years.

------
brudgers
The author's very own essay is a counter-example to the argument that ad
blocking starves the web to death.

What ad blocking does is eliminate lowest common denominator [ that
denominator being inversely proportional to the amount of money an advertizer
is willing to pay ] from pages that are willing to accept the risks of placing
crappy advertizing alongside their content.

Good advertizing extends content. The author's pitch for his book and fonts is
a case in point. If the essay's page had been covered with advertisements for
"local women who want to meet six-pack abs making $5000 a week surfing the
internet" or used <blink>, I would not have been pitched the book and fonts
because crude forms of advertizing correlate with crude forms of content.

This HN page is another example of big money to be made with a subtle pitch [
the article talks about a business model in the same branch of the spiral
galaxy as Ycombinator's ]. The monetization of exhaust fumes is just extremely
long tail.

In the end, successful advertizing depends on segmentation. Ad-block serves
advertizers needs by not putting ads in front of people who might be inclined
to form a negative impression of their business when shown ads on a webpage. I
still hold HP creepy based on their targeting me in the early days of this
capability [ and before I used ad blocking and noscript ].

------
tormeh
"Take the ex­am­ple of desk­top web browsers. Let’s face it, un­less you’re
re­ally slow on the up­take, you’ve out­fit­ted your web browser with an ad
blocker. Ha ha, you win! But wait—that means most web ads are only reach­ing
those who are re­ally slow on the up­take. So their dol­lars are
dis­pro­por­tion­ately im­por­tant in sup­port­ing the con­tent you’re
get­ting ad-free. “Not my prob­lem,” you say. Oh re­ally? Since those peo­ple
are the only ones fi­nan­cially sup­port­ing the con­tent, pub­lish­ers
in­creas­ingly are shap­ing their sto­ries to ap­peal to them. Even­tu­ally,
the con­tent you liked—well, didn’t like it enough to pay for it—will be gone.

Why? Be­cause you starved it to death. The im­mutable law re­mains: you can’t
get some­thing for noth­ing. The web has been able to de­fer the
con­se­quences of this prin­ci­ple by shift­ing the costs of con­tent off
read­ers and onto ad­ver­tis­ers. But if read­ers per­ma­nently with­draw as
eco­nomic par­tic­i­pants in the writ­ing in­dus­try—i.e., refuse to vote with
their wal­lets—then they’ll have no rea­son to protest as the uni­verse of
good writ­ing shrinks. (And make no mis­take—it’s al­ready happening.)"

This. So much this. I'm as guilty as anyone else, but I try to remember to
disable my adblocker for sites I like.

~~~
tomjen3
The problem is that they would shift the content anyway. No reason to appeal
to geeks when you can just write empty crap that gets ten times the pageview.

~~~
angelbob
Heya. I'm the author of Rebuilding Rails. While I don't (currently) use paid
advertising, I _do_ work entirely to appeal to geeks. My second product, a
Ruby deployment class, also appeals almost entirely to geeks.

Geeks pay money for things. Not always, but it happens.

That means that the shift of content away from geeks is to some extent in the
hands of you (collectively), those same geeks.

And me. I don't just sell to geeks. I'm also a geek who pays money for things
aimed at geeks.

You do too, if you think about it.

Many of those things can be advertised. For an example, think about ThinkGeek.

------
_delirium
As a nitpick (it only scales the numbers a bit) I would guess the proportion
of paying _readers_ is actually quite a bit higher than 1:650.

The "650,000 readers" figure quoted here appears to be total hits to the
website, which is an extremely optimistic count of the number of readers. It's
almost certain that a large proportion of those did not read the book at all,
and therefore it's unsurprising they didn't pay for it, either. Raw hit counts
include people who just open every link on an HN or Reddit page in a new tab,
and may or may not read the resulting tab; it also includes people who clicked
on a Google search result and immediately bounced when they realized it wasn't
what they were looking for.

It's hard to get good numbers on this sort of thing, but one proxy that's
sometimes useful is the number of visitors who clicked on anything beyond the
first page they landed on.

------
fideloper
As one who is just about to publish his 2nd eBook (for money!), none of this
resonated with me.

Granted I write for the tech industry; Developers may be more willing to pay
for good, specific content that solve day-to-day issues for them.

Newsletters, blogs and book are all great for audience and (personal) brand
building. To the point of some naysayers: The time it takes isn't drastic, but
it does take some persistence.

"So far, I con­sider Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy to be a suc­cess­ful
ex­per­i­ment in web-based book pub­lish­ing."

...who needs to experiment? People are making money on eBooks. Period -
[https://leanpub.com/bestsellers_lifetime](https://leanpub.com/bestsellers_lifetime).

~~~
zrail
Yeah, I agree. I'm about to publish the second edition of my book targeting a
very specific niche of developers[1]. I've made approximately ten times what
he quotes there from a small fraction of the traffic his book has gotten.

Of course the real question is, if he had put a paywall on the book, would it
have gotten as much traffic? I would say if he had done what Sacha Greif has
done with Discover Meteor[2] and made the first few chapters free, he would
have done phenomenally better.

[1]: (Shameless plug) [https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-
payments](https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments)

[2]: [https://www.discovermeteor.com](https://www.discovermeteor.com)

~~~
sgdesign
Thanks for the plug :) Also relevant, a detailed case study about our sales by
the Gumroad folks:

[http://blog.gumroad.com/post/97148570338/discover-meteor-
cas...](http://blog.gumroad.com/post/97148570338/discover-meteor-case-study-
making-300-000-from-a)

------
protonfish
It's a nice article that has some good data and makes thoughtful points, but
oh my god the readability! That is the most gentle-on-my-eyes reading I think
I have ever done on the web.

As someone who has spent a lot of time finding ways to make web pages more
readable [https://github.com/chrisbroski/simple-
css](https://github.com/chrisbroski/simple-css) I am impressed. After a little
revers-engineering to figure out what he did that makes his so much better
than mine, I discovered the major difference is he is using the Equity font
[http://typographyforlawyers.com/equity.html](http://typographyforlawyers.com/equity.html)
(of his own making.) I typically think custom fonts are of dubious value but
damn in this instance it made a real difference.

I know the guy wrote a book on typography so I shouldn't be so surprised his
typography is so good, but I am so used to being disappointed.

------
egonschiele
I'm writing a book right now with Manning publishing, and I had considered
self-publishing as an alternative. In my experience:

\- $2-$3 per book for the author and 2000-3000 copies sounds right. I have
heard if your book sells 5000+ copies it is a "very successful" book. As a
comparison, my book has sold 1000 copies in the pre-sale so far.

\- I've heard that _on average_ if you publish the traditional route, you can
expect to make $10k. If you self-publish, you can expect $50k (no data to back
up these figures though)

Overall as an author you do get paid very little. I have thought about
publishing my next book on the web like this. The biggest advantage I see is
allowing reader comments for every paragraph similar to Medium. Thanks for the
writeup! After reading this, I don't think I would put a book online for free.
Charging even a little bit seems to be more effective.

------
mixmax
An anecdotal story to back up the authors point;

I live on a boat, and have done so for 8 years. I know quite a bit about what
it takes, what the difficulties are, what to look for when buying a boat, what
to do about heating in the winter, etc. etc.

I've thought about writing an e-book about it to give others an insight into
what the life is like, how to do it, what it costs, all sorts of
practicalities, etc. But I don't think I'll do it after having researched what
I can expect to make on it.

It's simply not worth my time because it seems like people on the Internet
generally aren't that willing to pay for good content.

~~~
sgdesign
The problem here is the size of the market, not the fact that people don't
want to pay. I assume the market is fairly small (at least, I don't know that
many people who live on a boat) so it might not be worth your time for that
reason.

But I would be willing to bet that there are people ready to pay anywhere from
$20 to $200 for a detailed guide or video course on how to live in a boat.

In fact you could replace "live in a boat" with pretty much any skill you can
think of ("play the ukulele", "get better at gardening") and I believe that
would still hold true.

------
josephlord
I think an important thing to consider is that many of the massive number who
didn't pay may have read very little and/or been happy not to read the book if
there was a charge. That is the number that needs to be compared when
comparing the success or failure of free.

------
untilHellbanned
> My pol­icy for Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy was sim­ple: read­ing the book
> would re­quire no pre­pay­ment. ... Call it an honor sys­tem. I’ve never
> used the term free to de­scribe the book, be­cause I don’t see it that way.

Onarbor, [https://onarbor.com](https://onarbor.com), follows the same ideal.

Digital currencies, with their minuscule fees, pricing flexibility, and
instantly international availability, will enable the proper monetization of
digital works.

If you don't believe me, believe Chris Dixon:
[http://cdixon.org/2013/09/14/the-internet-is-for-
snacking/](http://cdixon.org/2013/09/14/the-internet-is-for-snacking/)

------
mark_l_watson
The point the author made that resonated with me is """Prac­ti­cal
Ty­pog­ra­phy has also been a proof of my friend Richard Nash’s the­ory that
au­thors shouldn’t think of a book as the end of a re­la­tion­ship with the
reader, but as the be­gin­ning. The book be­comes an in­tro­duc­tion to a
range of pos­si­bil­i­ties."""

I have written many books, a few very profitable, but many not. While I really
enjoy the writing process (love it!) the huge win has been the relationships
formed with my readers.

------
tonetheman
this thread is why i love to read hn. super good stuff here

------
a3n
The article says if you use an ad-blocker then you're starving sites and the
web to death.

It's not that simple.

I don't mind looking at ads at all. I use an ad blocker because web ads
overreach. The egregious ones shout at me, play animations, use my machine
cycles, and worst, they track me. I'm creeped out when I look at some page,
and then see ads for what was on that page all over subsequent page visits
elsewhere.

Ad blockers are not starving the web, they're a feedback mechanism. They're
saying "this particular money channel doesn't work." And advertisers and
sellers may (I hope) be forced to think of something else.

The web is not only for content producers, it's also for consumers. If you're
a producer, and you need to make money, it's your responsibility to figure out
how to do that in a way that's acceptable to me, the consumer. And if you
can't, well, sorry about that. Do something else. As a ridiculous example, I'd
like to sit here on the couch all day and comment on HN, but that's not going
to feed me, so I have to get up and go do something totally different for the
rest of the day; later I'll bring home some money.

And for now I will continue to use ad blockers, sending the signal that this
way of making money isn't going to work with me.

~~~
hullo
I like to picture you, sitting there comfortable on the couch, waxing
philosophical, languorously reaching out to pluck the food out of my child's
hand as he goes to put it in his mouth. Because it works for you, right, you
wanted that sandwich? It was his responsibility to eat the sandwich somewhere
out of your reach? Want to talk about egregiousness, let's look at the
entitlement on display in this thread.

~~~
a3n
I'm not the one you should be complaining to. You should take it up with the
advertisers who fling so much crap at me that I finally threw up my hands and
said "Enough!" If you're advertising, then you're running with that crowd, and
while I'm sorry if I took a sandwich out of your child's hand, I'm not going
to watch rotten teeth, fungal toes (as mentioned elsewhere here) and have
myself tracked any more than I personally care to. It's all a continuum.

I don't think there's an RFC that describes how advertisements are supposed to
work on the Internet or the Web. These are just something that people have
piled on top, and they hope they make money. But there's no right to making
money in any particular way.

I'm pretty sure that most of the sites I look at don't have ads on them.
Unfortunately, I have to block all ads by default, because the few have ruined
it for me. If I visited your site regularly, and your site prompted me to
unblock so you could make money, I would do it. Until or unless I found your
ads performing some kind of objectionable behavior, and then I would re-block,
and maybe not visit again.

I am quite happy to have my visit blocked entirely because of my ad blocking.
You should try that, if you need to keep your kid in sandwiches.

I do pay for some content. For example, I pay for New York Times online
access. I also block there, and they've never complained to me about it.

I don't feel entitled to anything at all, except to tailor my Internet
experience within the bounds of technology and whatever is allowed by site
managers.

~~~
hullo
People using ad blockers doesn't actually bother me, I know it's a pointless
argument. What bugs me are people sitting around concocting elaborate moral
justifications. If you don't like my site, don't visit it. The end.

In any case, fortunately for you (and for everyone else!) content providers by
and large have decided that, rather than spend their time and efforts doing
whack-a-mole trying to "block" ad blockers from their sites (something you
seem to think is much simpler than it is), that it's more in their interest to
invest time and resources in developing more of that same content or
functionality that drew people there in the first place.

~~~
davidgerard
If your content disappears, I predict that nobody will care. You're a piece of
straw in a haystack.

------
pknight
tldr; Author gives away work for free, navel gazes in detail about how many
people didn't compensate the author, argues that they should because it is in
their best interests. I hope I spared someone the bore. Also included, a rant
about adblockers and how bad they are for the web.

My advice: if you want to see book sales, just put a price on your work. And
it's not the only way to benefit from a book, financially or otherwise. Spare
the world another boring rant how everybody should adapt to make it easier for
content creators to get paid. If the ad industry had any kind of self control,
people wouldn't have to go through the trouble of installing an adblocker. But
we don't live in such world, so why not move on. Not only does an adblocker
spare you from having to see ads you'd never engage with any way (and which
would otherwise be wasting away precious seconds of your life) you get faster
loading pages that are vastly safer. It's in content creators best interests
to find ways to fund their work that are also in the best interests of the
reader.

The real question is, how to make money providing content. There are many
viable answers. Ranting about how people don't behave the desired way is a
useless exercise.

~~~
davidgerard
[http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-
aesthe...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics-
punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/)

The other bit is (a) the presumption that only designated creators are able to
create (b) the presumption that the readers care. 'Cos observably they don't.
The guy's typesetting is FANTASTIC, but making people care about that
_probably_ doesn't involve complaining that the world is wrong.

------
onion2k
This is an example of Generalising From One Example[1]. The author doesn't
have enough information to draw the conclusions that he has drawn. In other
words, it's essentially nonsense.

[1] A good essay on the subject -
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

~~~
kuni-toko-tachi
Why the argument can be made that a single example does not prove a point, the
author nevertheless provides a description of his experience that can provide
others with valuable information. Therefore, to call this nonsense is very
unfair. He will learn from his experience, and by taking the time to present
in detail what insights he personally gained, a body of knowledge about this
subject emerges that will help others.

