
Show HN: How I turned an old book into a (barely) profitable website - AlexMuir
http://www.howacarworks.com/about
======
ChuckMcM
"I can only imagine that going up as Google starts to recognise this as
quality content and not just content farm rubbish."

Uh, no. It will go up as a function of traffic volume, so as your site starts
to rank higher organically you'll see more revenue but the amount paid isn't a
function of the 'quality' of the web site, its a function of what people bid
to be there and what they pay per click.

Note that if it goes up really suddenly your likely as not to have your
AdSense account suspended/cancelled, which after a lengthy review process they
_may_ re-instate but Google may not (according to web reports) ever replaced
the ad-revenue you lost while you were in this process.

That said, it is _great_ you are making this information available again. If
such efforts create a modest return then perhaps the archivists job is once
again secure.

~~~
jessepollak
I think you're misinterpreting what the OP means when he says that quote.

The way I read it, the OP was not saying that his AdSense payments would
increase because he got higher bids for the ads due to higher quality content,
but rather that as Google started to recognize that it was quality content,
the PageRank of his site would go up, display it more prominently and
generating more views and uniques.

I could be mistaken, but that interpretation seems to make a fair amount of
logical sense.

~~~
lukevdp
PageRank is based on links, not on content. His PageRank will only go up if he
gets more inbound links to the site.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

~~~
geon
I think the point was that Google spend a lot of effort to identify quality
content vs. link farms, auto-generated content and low quality adsense-
optimized content.

~~~
lukevdp
yes, but PageRank is a specific term with a specific meaning. It is a rank
based on the number and quality of links to your site.

To say that PageRank will increase because the content is good quality is
wrong, and I was just pointing that out.

What he meant to say was "... the search engine rankings of his site would go
up..."

~~~
jessepollak
You're right, I misspoke when I said PageRank. The gist was the some though:
higher quality content -> better search rankings (either through links due to
higher quality content or google's non-PageRank algorithms).

------
citricsquid
Questions:

Why are there comments on the page?

How difficult would it be to compile it into an ebook and make it available on
kindle/itunes/wherever else? Seems like you'd only need to make a couple of
sales for it to compete with the adsense income. Maybe have it so if the
visitor has read 3 or more consecutive pages it shows up with an ebook splash
page, "advert free and easy to read blah blah blah"

~~~
AlexMuir
I put in the comments because I thought it'd be an easy way of adding some
content for free as people add to the information already there, and also to
let people moan about errors so that I can then go in and fix them. Comments
are a fairly low-maintenance feedback system, especially with Disqus dealing
with the spam filtering for me.

An eBook is a great idea. I just worry that the information is slightly out of
date for people to actually pay for it. I know virtually nothing about ebook
formats so this would be quite a learning curve for me. I'll bear it in mind
though. I could realistically see 200 x $5 sales per year, which isn't to be
sneezed at.

~~~
nollidge
Yeah but comments will add load time and clutter to the page. Also I'll bet if
this picks up any steam, the comments will devolve quickly without technically
being spam.

~~~
rapind
Disqus loads in after page load, so it shouldn't add load time to the content.
Also keep in mind that comments add SEO (and can be extremely valuable for
this reason alone).

Plus I don't think it's such a bad idea from a reader's perspective. Seems
like the worse case scenario is that no one uses it, and the best case
scenario people are able to contribute to improvements.

~~~
toast0
If the comments load in after the page loads, crawlers are unlikely to see
them, so you're not getting much SEO benefit.

Worst case is off-topic comments that take time to remove, significantly worse
than nobody using it.

~~~
rapind
They actually have a deal with google where all of their comments are directly
indexed and attributed to the sites (likely similar to canonical references).

It used to be a problem a couple years ago, and sites would then use the API
to load in comments and include them server-side. Obviously this wasn't ideal,
but it's a solved problem now.

------
jessepollak
Just a thought: I might consider a different monetization strategy than
AdSense. The ads really look awful and make the site seem significantly less
'quality' than it actually is.

I might experiment with some sort of freemium model; maybe for free you could
get the first half of sections for every chapter and then you can pay ~$5 to
get access to everything.

Or, as someone above mentioned, compile it into an ebook and have that
advertised on the site for ~$10, but make the entire website free.

~~~
AlexMuir
You are right, the ads look absolutely shit - I could perhaps go with
Buysellads when traffic picks up.

Interesting idea - I'm a huge admirer of things that follow that model -
Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and Avdi Grimm's Object's On Rails.

I am hoping that people fixing cars are more transactional (read likely to
click an ad) than people looking for coding tutorials. I might leave it as ads
for six months and then try six months of freemium access and compare the two.

~~~
jessepollak
I like the idea of A/B testing the ad v. freemium models, but make sure to
take into account the growth in traffic that will happen in the first 6 months
etc.

------
AlexMuir
I'd welcome any suggestions on where to go next - it's a bit of a fire-and-
forget side project, but I'd still like to get it as good as possible before I
leave it to stew for 2013.

~~~
JonnieCache
I'd load it up with all the "semantic web" style things I could find.
<http://schema.org> type of stuff.

You could also see if it would be good as a source for citations in the
relevant wikipedia articles, but that's a whole project in itself probably.

~~~
AlexMuir
I had a look at the Schema stuff - I actually use it on another site of mine (
<http://thebigeat.com> ) for listings of takeaways, but it has made no
difference SEO-wise and it tends to make my markup look like shit. But
nevermind A/B testing, I am doing A-Z testing here - throw everything and see
what sticks.

I'm hesitant to go adding my site as a citation - it's a good idea but it just
seems a bit black-hat for me. Hopefully it's something that might happen
organically though.

~~~
JonnieCache
Marching in and adding links to your site to WP is certainly a bad idea, as
well as being plain ethically wrong. I was thinking more of turning up to the
talk page for the car article and just offering them the content, but even
that probably contravenes wiki-core directive #5749327.

I mentioned it because your site seems like a genuinely good source that WP
would be happy to use, making it a win-win. Don't try and use wikipedia for
pagerank boys and girls.

~~~
dageshi
I've always had the impression that actually being linked from wikipedia isn't
necessarily a good thing SEO wise. That is I think that a long time ago google
decided to penalise sites being linked from major wiki's to stop them being
spammed to death.

But I'm basing that only rumour and supposition so certainly don't take it as
truth.

------
ragmondo
I would

1) Make the pages editable by trusted individuals but with your validation
before any change goes live. Allow the authors to be credited (with links to
their blogs, pages etc etc).

2) Why stop at cars? Find a domain "howdoesa???work" and subdir it off that -
offer written credit to anybody who wants to add any large-ish content.

3) Put in some clever links to amazon etc so that if someone wants to buy a
new car battery you might be able to nail som e affliate fees. Especially if
they are on your page, have identified that they need a battery - why go back
to the search bar when you have "click here for battery offers". I am
suggesting keeping it "neat" though. Please don't start adding horrid looking
ads disguised as CTA buttons.

4) Cut your mate into a %age so he's a good posterboy for digitising other
content.

~~~
geon
> Make the pages editable by trusted individuals

Way too much work

> Why stop at cars?

You'd need some content to begin with. He was lucky to have a friend who gave
him permission to use the book. Other material might not be so easy to get.

> Put in some clever links to amazon etc

Great idea. Done tastefully, it would not be intrusive like an ad, but a
useful tool for the reader who would need this kind of book.

------
brightghost
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned how badly in need of proofing this content
is. I just looked through a handful of sections but the ones I saw were
littered with missing words, out-of-place headings, and poorly-cropped
illustrations. It seems like great content, and the idea of charging for it
has merit, but you're not going to be able to do so without proofing the
content; it doesn't seem to me that even a cursory scan-through of all the
pages has been done.

------
TamDenholm
I've always wanted to see the entire library of haynes manuals put online or
even in an ipad/iphone app. This looks a bit like a proof of concept to it.
Perhaps the OP could approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an
example?

~~~
JonnieCache
_> approach Haynes pitching the idea and showing this as an example?_

This is the correct answer. At least try and get a friend to do it, and take a
cut.

The idea of being able to flick through all the haynes manuals on an ipad is
brilliant. And I don't even like cars.

~~~
antidoh
Question to motorheads:

Would you use a shop manual exclusively on an ( _your_ ) ipad?

Or would you prefer to have a paper copy, so that you don't get your ipad
greasy and scratched while you're working on a car?

Question to everyone: when are we going to have devices that are cheap and
rugged enough that my first question doesn't matter?

Edit: If that ever happens, they won't be sold by Apple, the company that made
unboxing a fetish.

~~~
orangethirty
No. I need a paper manual. I can write notes on it _with grease_ , and not
care about. It doesn't get scratched, need updates, or charging. Plus I can
throw it in the trunk of my car and not worry about it.

------
hahla
This may have been a lucky break. Google keyword tool suggests that "how a car
works" is 1) low competition 2) 135,000 global 3) 60,500 local. This is an
amazing and rare find, most keywords like this are already well picked over by
niche site creators - also from the looks of it you were the first registrant
in 2011.

~~~
AlexMuir
Yeah, I felt lucky getting the domain. But then I also loved FixingACar.com as
well.

------
OkGoDoIt
This is nifty, and I feel like this could be pushed a lot further. Epub output
is an obvious next step, and I'd imagine a better table of contents view would
make the web version more inviting. As for generating money, maybe hotlink
products to an Amazon/etc affiliate link so when a user reads the page about
"Replacing engine mountings", you can suggest sites that sell engine
mountings.

I'm curious about the intermediate "Horrible HTML" stage. Did it retain the
book layout at the stage? The scanned book images look much more appealing
than the blog-style version (in my opinion). Even though the HTML was
horrible, did it still display properly in a modern browser? I wonder if you
could write a script to clean up and modernize the HTML while still retaining
the nice layout, rather than reformatting into a blog and dumping images to
the sidebar.

It would be interesting to see how much the process can be streamlined so you
can convert books en masse. I assume there are plenty of books of this style
with really good content that would be useful to convert in this manner.

~~~
AlexMuir
Sadly the HTML rendering was fairly dreadful but it did at least have the
images in the correct order. It retained no placement, and each page is very
different in layout. My early thought was to have perhaps 4 layouts which I
could manually assign each page to. (eg. large central image, 2-large images,
etc.)

------
darkxanthos
The obvious next step to me would be for you to repeat this process with
another out of print book now that you've established a market and proven its
viability.

Offer the copyright holder some share of the profit and scale like mad.

Great stuff!

~~~
AlexMuir
That was my initial thought but I have to see how the revenue scales. At the
moment it's only profitable because my labour has had zero cost.

It might scale quite nicely though - I think finding the right material is
probably key.

------
ivix
I'd make more of a feature of the awesome cut away drawings - I always loved
them as a kid in Usborne books. Did your friend do the drawings?

~~~
AlexMuir
I'm not sure on the illustrations - I'd have to ask. He wrote some of the
content, but also ran the company that owned the copyright on the work. They
are wonderful and I have to emphasise them some more.

------
quasque
It's a lovely idea, but from a design point of view, the site looks really
quite unpleasant: the green pastel background, ugly font choices, an
uninviting table of links as the home page, and inlining the figures far too
small to be useful.

I would recommend at least following some of the design choices of the
original book, so the difference between text and figures is not so jarring.
But better to extract drawings out of the scans and relabel using a consistent
set of fonts, while creating a more interesting and captivating layout. It
would be awesome to see this book brought to life by a more modern design with
all the benefits of hyperlinking (both internal and external, e.g. wikipedia).

It's a real shame the presentation is so poor, as the information is actually
really useful and interesting. A great start anyway.

------
braveheart1723
this is great, actual useful content with great illustrations. It's refreshing
to see something with some practical use.

Growing up I remember being obsessed with this: DK The Way Things Work. it was
an amazing mac CD ROM with illustrations of everyday things broken down, with
moving parts and all...

Probably one of the reason i became an engineer.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work>

[http://www.amazon.com/Things-Work-CD-ROM-
Version-1-0-mac/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Things-Work-CD-ROM-
Version-1-0-mac/dp/0789400901)

Horrible Youtube video ( best i could find... )
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4MIVU5i_xE>

Cannot recommend it enough for kids. They don't make em like they used to :D

~~~
zevyoura
The Way Things Work (the book) is amazing; the new version also includes
chapters on computers and electronics. Not sure about that dated "multimedia
experience," but the book itself definitely holds up fantastically well.

------
phaus
Thanks for showing us. While my father can fix / build nearly anything, I
overspecialized in computers and electronics, so I know almost nothing about
cars. I've been looking for a way to remedy this and your site looks perfect.

~~~
AlexMuir
Buy a wreck and take it to pieces and try to understand it. Then just sell it
for scrap and recoup most of your money. You could even sell the parts
individually and make some profit. Then try a project car - I'm surprised more
hackers aren't into cars really. Sadly I'm in an apartment at the moment
without the space.

------
vinhboy
Looks like your site is already number 3 on my google search for "how a car
works".

The homepage is a bit boring. You have a lot of pretty pictures, you should
some how use them on your homepage. Perhaps include a relevant picture with
every chapter heading.

And for good measure, include all the social share buttons junk. Google+, FB,
Twitter, etc... Especially for if you get popular on HN. You'll want those
sharing karmas...

I would also drop another adsense text box into the side nav. Perhaps remove
the one at the bottom of the page.

~~~
nollidge
> And for good measure, include all the social share buttons junk. Google+,
> FB, Twitter, etc... Especially for if you get popular on HN. You'll want
> those sharing karmas

Ugh, no, for crap's sake, don't do this. People will share things if they want
to.

[http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-
media/14...](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-
media/149922/limited-use-of-sharing-buttons-shows-desire-to-share-links-
privately/)

[http://www.business2community.com/social-media/a-hot-
button-...](http://www.business2community.com/social-media/a-hot-button-issue-
do-social-sharing-buttons-work-0231001)

[http://www.searchenginejournal.com/too-many-social-media-
sha...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/too-many-social-media-sharing-
buttons-make-your-site-less-social/48240/)

etc.

------
Chico75
Questions:

1) How much time did it take after the scanning to get the site and content
online? 2) Do you think you could automate the process and get a 2nd book done
in a faster way?

~~~
AlexMuir
After the scanning I took about 2 days to OCR everything. That was fairly
mindnumbing.

Then it was a case of coding up a fairly simple Rails app and parsing that
content - another two days. Some thinking time in the middle - I'd say a week.
Spread over a year(!)

------
hnriot
And no mention of using Twitter Bootstrap?

I like how the site looks/works, you did an awesome job, but some credit in
the "how I ..." should go to the Bootstrap team.

~~~
AlexMuir
You're right - and also credit should go to the excellent
<http://bootswatch.com/> which is where I got the themed Bootstrap from. I'm a
lover of Bootstrap but I hope it doesn't define the site.

------
pitchups
Those images on the right side of each page are great; They could be used to
good effect to make the site more appealing visually as well as unique, if you
displayed one or more of them in full size interleaved with the text: maybe
one on top of each page; and one on the sidebar. They may also help with SEO
(use alt-image tags), and ad Click-thru-rates, if placed close to or next to
the ads.

------
biot
The biggest beef I have is that the site doesn't tell you how a car works. I
clicked on "Transmission" hoping to see how an automatic transmission works,
but the TOC only had information on checking, filling, and adjusting various
things. Perhaps the fixingacar.com domain would be more appropriate for this
content?

------
wallflower
Scope creep suggestion: It may be cheesy but I believe a rotating little GIF
animation on the home page/header of how a small part of a car works would
draw in people. As it is now, it is static.

Think more <http://www.brainpop.com>, less Encyclopedia Brittanica

------
bjnord
I, for one, would be interested in seeing that nokogiri script that turns ugly
HTML into markdown... although I'd totally understand if you want to keep it
close as a competitive advantage. ;-) I regularly have to deal with the ugly
HTML that various apps' "Export" features disgorge.

~~~
AlexMuir
It's so hacky that it's almost certainly a competitive disadvantage.

Converting to markdown is a bit of an overstatement - it only handles the
limited content that I encountered in this book.

\- H1 heading -> ##

\- Strip P tags and add newlines

\- Replace 'See SHEET \d+' with [[Article:\d]]

------
schappim
You inspired me! This weekend I did my own book to website conversion:
<http://recipesforseafood.com/>

I'll keep you posted as to what $$$ it generates (if any)...

Cheers,

Marcus

------
kriro
This is really fascinating. Great article. I think fiddling with paper->web
(or something else digital) and improving that workflow sounds like fun.

------
aw3c2
what did/do you count as your expenses? surely you do not pay 60$/month for
hosting. did you add the work you had to do?

~~~
AlexMuir
Hosting is on a $20/month Linode along with a bunch of other
projects/sites/bits of code fluff. The actual bandwidth used by this site will
be virtually nothing I imagine. I haven't valued my time at all. In that
respect it is already earning me around $40 a month - a meal out.

~~~
Xavi
Are you paying any money to the original author?

~~~
AlexMuir
He's not bothered - it's an experiment for both of us. If it works out then
I'll see him right, but there's no point in hashing out some lengthy agreement
if it doesn't bring in the bucks.

------
kamakazizuru
this is awesome - I'm curious though - aren't you theoretically violating the
copyright of the actual author?

~~~
shawn-butler
This is essentially a derivative work. And the blog post specifically states
he had the permission of the holder who was a family friend.

Now having the permission not in writing even (especially?) of friends and
family is generally not a good idea, but not exactly the end of the world
either.

------
thoughtcriminal
Cool experiment. I thought about doing something like this myself. Maybe a
remix of classic books under the public domain to create a new work with a
contemporary message. Maybe then publish it online and monetize it via Adsense
(although I'm not a big fan of that business model).

Instead, I decided to share a personal finance hack I developed called the No
Budget Budget: <https://leanpub.com/nobudgetbudget/> and sell it as an
affordable ebook.

Again, the monetization isn't great, but it means more people can read it and
hopefully benefit from it.

The point is ideas are everywhere. I like pursuing ideas that will have the
greatest positive impact. Then, like the legendary NFL coach Bill Walsh used
to say, "the score takes care of itself".

~~~
darkxanthos
Your link doesn't work for me.

~~~
thoughtcriminal
Fixed. Thanks for the heads up.

