

335k downloads of Learning Python The Hard Way - bigiain
http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1301901149.html

======
astrofinch
It's a pretty fast download. It's possible that folks are downloading the book
every time they come back to read more of it.

To check this, you could see how strongly browsers with built-in PDF viewers
are being overrepresented in the logs--especially compared to some control web
page that doesn't link to Learning Python the Hard Way (an unrelated blog
post, say). (The point of the control web page being to measure the effect of
people interested in programming-related topics using classier browsers with
built-in PDF viewers.)

~~~
nikster
Hate that about Safari. Most of the time I certainly don't want to read a PDF
in the browser.

~~~
tuhin
If I am not wrong, Chrome behaves in a similar fashion too, right?

~~~
maguay
Yes, Chrome now includes a native PDF viewer -
[http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-in-
chrome.ht...](http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-in-chrome.html).
Works quite good, too, and is much faster than the Adobe Acrobat embedded
reader. Though, usually when I click a PDF link I want to download it instead
of viewing it in my browser.

------
PaulJoslin
I think if you were to release a new book, you should target it at $7-$12,
rather than $1.

The hurdle of paying anything at all, is likely to stop many from going any
further and on the opposite side, the people who are probably likely to still
pay (they read your free book / know your rep) - are probably quite happy to
pay a higher price than $1. Therefore limiting your price to $1 would lose you
money.

e.g. Free price - 335,000 downloads - $0 sales.

$1 price - 26,000 downloads - $26,000 sales

$7 price - 13,000 downloads - $91,000 sales

\- This is ultimately why you would have to experiment with pricing and see
the effect on your sales cycle. Often a higher price yields a greater profit,
as the number of sales doesn't drop as much as expected.

~~~
slee029
I agree that you should play around with price, but I also believe Zed could
be leveraging his free tutorial to market another service later on.

For example, while this isn't an intro to python book, Michael Hartl's Ruby on
Rails Tutorial I think provides an excellent revenue model for authors.

Basically he provides a free online tutorial that he cross-subsidizes with
charging on the premium screencasts and pdf/hardbook editions. I read the
tutorial myself in a few days as a beginner and eventually was convinced to
buy the screencasts to get a better visual understanding. If it wasn't for the
free text I would never have known about Michael's skills and would definitely
not have paid for it.

You also have extremely experienced industry leaders providing free
screencasts and podcasts educating others for free but in turn increasing
their own exposure and overall deal-flow. In the case of coders, you could
expect guys like Ryan Bates and Charles Wood to increase their
consulting/speaking engagements, where in the case of vc's and angels like
Mark Suster and Jason Calacanis I would expect better deal-flow of up and
coming startups.

As such, before resorting to price elasticity, I like the general idea of
working through cross-subsidization to figure out alternative revenue streams.

------
mgkimsal
I suspect a few things are at play.

1\. Free - it's free. People download stuff all the time if it's free.

2\. Multiple downloaders - no doubt some people bookmark the page and refer to
it online vs downloading, so they count multiple times.

3\. Charging $1 - I think charging anything for it would probably have skewed
the numbers _way_ down - likely to less than 20k. What might offset that back
up is the author's name - Zed's got quite a rep already, so people know what
they're getting in to up front.

~~~
statictype
The book is for people who are not already programmers so it seems unlikely to
me that Zed's reputation would be any sort of factor.

I agree that charging anything for it would have reduced the download count to
about 10% of whatever the total is.

~~~
gatzby3jr
My friend recently came to me stating that he wanted to learn programming. I
directed him to Zed's book.

~~~
w1ntermute
But that doesn't mean it's just because of Zed's "star power" - I've
recommended it to several people, but only because it's a good book.

------
scrame
I actually bought and read the book.

I was mostly interested in seeing what a self-published web-focused book would
look like. I had read some of zeds other writings and work a bit with python.

It took me a few sessions to get through (and I didn't do the exercises), but
its a pretty good book. Even though its tilted towards beginners, the really
easy stuff is in the first half and you can skim through it.

The second half (chapter 27 and on) do a good job of covering thinking like a
programmer, and builds up a basic text adventure.

From someone who has been a computer programmer for a long time, and read a
lot of programming books, it was informative and entertaining.

If a third of a million people have downloaded it, at least a few are reading
it, making programs, and finding out that its worth doing even if it isn't
easy.

~~~
pjscott
If you've been a programmer for a long time, then you're not in the book's
target audience. It's aimed at raw beginners, and for them it's damn near
perfect.

------
jeremydavid
Imagine if he had made people sign up to his mailing list in exchange for the
free download. Even if it reduced downloads by 50%, he would still have
168,000 people on his list that are actively looking for programming material.

His next book that he's charging $1 for? 168,000 prospects to start the ball
rolling.

Or he could set up an auto responder and ask for donations a set amount of
time after the download.

Your mailing list is one of your most valuable assets! Don't ignore it :)

~~~
duopixel
Programmers are a very different crowd, they will give you throwaway accounts
to get past e-mail barriers. They will mark you as spam in Gmail, lowering
your reputation.

Don't push programmers stuff they don't want, let them reach you easily (RSS,
twitter).

~~~
rch
Agreed. I was one of those downloads, but I wouldn't have handed over an email
address for the privilege.

One thing though... if I do opt-in for something, I wouldn't mark it as spam
in a web mail client. That is strictly non-programmer behavior.

~~~
dpritchett
I'll mark your newsletter as spam in gmail if you don't provide an easy way
for me to unsubscribe - preferably without having to remember my account info.

~~~
rch
Good point. I still might start with a friendly email though.

------
ch0wn
> But you bet your ass I'm writing some more of these and charging a enough to
> make $1 or $2 off each copy.

Do one on ZeroMQ and C and I will gladly pay you $30.

~~~
wyclif
Yes to the C book. It seems because of the age of C that there is a gap in the
literature for a more up-to-date book (one that would be pre-K&R).

~~~
_delirium
Harbinson & Steele's "C: A Reference Manual" is updated to cover C99 in the
5th ed: <http://www.careferencemanual.com/>

Admittedly, probably not the best beginner's introduction, so there's still a
gap there.

------
adambyrtek
I wonder how these statistics would look like if he really charged 1$ for each
copy. It's risky to extrapolate, because people are surprisingly resistant to
paying for stuff online, even if the price is extremely small.

~~~
bigiain
That might be true, but it's worth at least looking at Apple's App Store, and
noticing that if you make it easy enough, lots of people _are_ perfectly happy
to pay 99c for 10 or 20 minutes worth of entertainment.

If Zed could find an easy enough way to let people give him just a little bit
of money for his work, I suspect quite a lot of people would do so.

~~~
nikster
The App store and iTunes are the first micro payment systems to really reach a
mass market. It's so easy - click, and I get something.

If an app is 99 ct I am not going to go through the trouble to search for a
torrent - I will just click on it, and not having to enter my cc details _yet
again_ just makes it easier.

He could sell it in the iBook store no? Link from the web page directly to the
iBooks store, done.

~~~
rmc
_He could sell it in the iBook store no? Link from the web page directly to
the iBooks store, done._

Don't forget the Kindle Store aswell.

------
abraxasz
> then I think everyone is seriously under evaluating the power of online
> publishing

Well actually I believe it is not so much "online publishing" than "free
publishing" that is under evaluated, especially concerning programming books.

The thing is that when you want to teach yourself a programming language,
there is a ton of free material online, so you don't want to go buy a hardcopy
of a book (except some really exceptional material sucha as sicp, and others).
It is especially true if it is not your first programming language, so you
don't need all the "algorithm" stuff, and are just looking for a quick
reference, some idioms, and a lot of code examples.

The only issue with the stuff you find online is that there seldom is a unique
comprehensive source of information. You often have to jump between different
tutorials in order to grasp certain concepts (can't help to mention the
concept of monads in Haskell, which is a perfect illustration of what I'm
saying).

So I'm not surprised that a tutorial covering many topics got so many hits..

> .. or charge about $1

Doesn't sound like a good idea. The problem is not with the price, but with
the effort required to pay. I don't have a paypal account, and I don't plan to
get one just to buy a tutorial, when I have tons of other ressources online.
This is very different from the "apple apps" that cost one dollar: the cost is
the same, but the effort required is much smaller.

~~~
ryall
The trouble with online tutorials is that they lack the cohesiveness of books.
Usually they focus on how-to-do one single aspect and you lose the overall
view of the subject as a whole.

------
singular
Congratulations Zed - whether the numbers are inflated by multiple downloads
or not, that is an absolutely amazing result, and hugely encouraging for
others planning to publish tech books online. I suspect you underestimate how
much of that is down to you being a particularly skilled author, however :-)

Have any other HNers had similarly big success publishing tech books online?
Anyone make significant money doing so? Would be curious to see whether this
is a new, relatively untapped market here :-)

------
sigil
There are 20K unique User-Agent strings in the logfile, which gives an extreme
lower bound.

    
    
      $ cut -f12-100 -d' ' lpthw.Apr.04.2011.log | sed -e 's# "-"$##; s/^"//; s/"$//;' | \
      sort | uniq -c | sed -e 's/^ *//' | \
      sort -k1,1nr | tee ua.txt | wc -l
      20122
    

UA is still far from uniquely identifying so this is a gross underestimate. If
the IP field were hashed instead of 0.0.0.0 a better estimate would be
possible, but the order of magnitude of the claim (100k) seems right to me.

------
wmat
I've been watching the self-publishing world lately since reading Jon
Konrath's blog here: <http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/> and I have to say, why
can't I get all the programming books I want for approximately $1-$5 per book
in electronic format? I'd probably buy at least 1 book/week at that price!

So here's an idea for what I'd pay for, as a more technical reader: technical
ebook purchasing for $1-$5 per book with the option of accessing the book via
a distributed source control system. The purchase then entitles me to push
errata, additions, etc. back to the author as well as to pull contributions,
fixes, etc. from the readers. With each ebook major version release, I'd pay
the purchase amount again to gain access to the new version. That new version
may merely be all of the changes I've already had access to via source
control, but payment then unlocks access to the next major branch. Patch
review could even be offloaded to readers via up/down votes.

My main goal here is to counteract the short half life of the majority of most
technical books, benefit from the other readers as much as possible and
encourage current/potential authors with appropriate payment.

Call it an "o'reilly killer", or "gitbooks" or whatever.

Cheers Bill

~~~
pchristensen
I think that's taking the trend to a consumer-focused extreme that might not
maximize the benefit to the author. I can see opening up your process for
50-250 "beta-testers" who need the information yesterday and are willing to
put work into it. But for the most part, people willing to wait for and pay
for a technical book are people who will trade money for decreased time cost.
Hence a nicely packaged, structured, edited book. The bar of quality and trust
is pretty high, because if either of those are compromised, then the reader is
wasting time and might as well have self-taught.

 _I'd probably buy at least 1 book/week at that price!_

I'm subscribed to the ebook deal of the day for O'Reilly
(<http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/ebookdealoftheday>), Apress
(<http://www.apress.com/info/dailydeal>) and Manning
(<http://www.manning.com/free/dotd.html>) and I've purchased about 1 ebook a
week this year for between $5-20 each.

~~~
wmat
Perhaps you're right. I guess I'm being a little selfish in so far as what
I've described is what I'd want, as a potential paying customer. I still want
the structure and editing though, so I'm not sure how payment could be
distributed to contributors, such as editors. Perhaps my model would be most
applicable to those who self-publish without external contributors.

I've looked at the O'Reilly and others deals-of-the-day and ebook promotions
and they almost always are to expensive, or are stale.

~~~
pchristensen
The ebook deals are about creating a new market (patient, price sensitive
buyers)for existing products.

Your proposal is for entirely new products, and I think it's unlikely that the
existing publishing companies will change enough to produce them. There is
something to the idea, and would probably best be done by the communities
surrounding open source products. Don't let this idea die.

------
duopixel
While appreciate Zed's effort, I think he tried too hard to differentiate from
Dive into Mark's one. I found the book mind numbing. It's Python the boring
way, the first 70 pages are dedicated to displaying strings!

~~~
pjscott
I used to teach an introduction to programming class, for people who've never
programmed before, don't know what a string is, and are still having trouble
wrapping their heads around the concept of even _having_ a precise syntax, let
alone figuring out what it does, or learning to translate their thoughts into
programs. You've probably forgotten what that was like; I sure did, until I
saw a classroom full of students struggling in the same ways, with textbooks
that failed to help them out.

The parts you found boring are some of the most important parts, since they
let someone figure out this "programming" thing and build up an understanding
of the very basics.

------
Fester
Zed did an awesome job. If I'll have a chance, I will do my best to deliver
this book to my university's CS faculty, where newcomers are still being taugh
with Delphi (d'oh).

------
Maro
Congrats on all those downloads. I have to say though, I think most people see
it's free and just download it into their 'temp' or 'ebooks' folder and then
forget about it. I know I used to do this when I was younger and learning new
programming languages all the time.

------
Kilimanjaro
Upload it to the AppStore for $1.99 just to test the waters.

------
forkrulassail
Congrats, and kudos for adding to the knowledge pool for learners. You should
consider making .mobi and .epub available as well.

------
wildmXranat
Content and quality of that book is a large factor but so is the price tag of
zero dollars.

