The economics of a web-based book, year two | Hacker News Reader

The economics of a web-based book, year two

practicaltypography.com

86 pointssamsolomon30 comments

I really like how quotable this post is

> It’s perhaps fitting that down the road from Apple, we have bottom-feeding behemoths like Facebook and Google. These companies are the sewage-treatment plants of the information age: shoveling the worst quality of human attention into piles, seasoning it with surveillance data, and packaging it into resalable chunks. But it’s an open question whether their skill is extracting hidden value from the web, or merely organizing its disappointments.

As I've progressed through the various stages of being a programmer and a denizen of the internet I've become more and more willing to pay for curated content, not algorithmically curated content but actual human curated content like ebooks. That quote hits the nail on the head for why I've started to think about information that way. An actual community and network of humans is more valuable to me than "streams" and "firehoses" but actual humans can not be seasoned with surveillance data and packaged into resalable chunks so Google and Facebook work with the closest proxy that they can control (the click stream) and optimize their entire operation around that.

The more I think about things like this the more I'm convinced that the current way of doing things is not sustainable. The race to the bottom for eyeballs is also the race to the bottom for relevant information content and that is obviously not a sustainable long-term strategy. Somewhere in that post he also makes the analogy with sub-prime mortgage instruments and unlike financial institutions that could be propped up by tax payers I don't think the sub-prime information economy has the analog of the U.S. government to keep it afloat.

Also

> Apple is often credited with proving that design excellence leads to market success. Not really. Apple’s resurgence is only incidentally about design. Mostly, it’s about carefully selecting a territory of valuable customers—in Apple’s case, status-conscious people with copious disposable income—and defending that territory tooth and nail. Apple does not sell great design. It sells design that flatters its owner.

I think the author could have made significantly more revenue if he invested in copywriting that demonstrated some empathy.

He is clearly intelligent, articulate and well versed in the subject-matter. Unfortunately his observations about traffic sources (ie. the intention of HN's existence) showed a rather pronounced lack of EQ.

Copy that connects always considers the reader.

Additionally, the placement of payment options with just dollar amounts hidden in a passage of text is far too obscure. I suspect from what he has written and the choices he has made to encourage purchases, that he believes there isn't a way to be more overt without being nagging, annoying, over-dramatic or using dark patterns.

If this is the case, then that's a shame. Well placed, well-intentioned buying options executed with the kind care and skills that he has are actually a good thing for the reader, respect the audience and would increase conversion.

> Unfortunately his observations about traffic sources (ie. the intention of HN's existence) showed a rather pronounced lack of EQ.

His analysis of HN doesn't seem that far off the mark. It's amazing how many people seem to be taking it as a personal put down.

Oh, I don't disagree actually. And I'm not active enough on here to really identify as being one of the crowd anyway. It was an example, and one that would be easily identifiable here.

Re. the traffic source observations, they were clearly written this way to be controversial and thus generate more comments and more views from mentioned sources. Very clever I'd say.

Sure but page views don't equal dollars.

It's very frustrating, because this is being called an experiment in web publishing, but this post shows that he's either not trying to do the footwork in the "publishing" part of web publishing, or maybe he just lacks the knowledge to do so.

Go to the "how to pay"[1] page and count how long it takes for you to figure out how to give the guy $5. _Then_ try to go through the checkout process (which asks me for a shipping address!). The ultimate irony is that that post says my time is expensive, yet does not make it take 10 seconds (Stripe Checkout form) to give him money.

These 1:1000 numbers are being presented as if it's indicative of the state of the web publishing universe, but my guess is these numbers would be much better by spending some time on the "publishing" part of the job. And, unlike what the writer seems to imply with his whole mailing list digression, those changes can make the user experience better as well!

I hope this doesn't become a reference point for people.

[1]http://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.html

The guy is no good at selling himself and appears to feel that doing so would be tawdry.

"Copy that connects always considers the reader."

This is true, but personally I've become jaded with over the top, long, emotionally manipulative copy. I've fallen for these in the past and wasted lots of money (I am embarrassed about it). They annoy me these days and I quickly close such pages and make a mental note not to click on them again.

I really struggled, even now, to understand exactly what the author is selling (looks like the overall website) and how to buy.

There are a lot of options and he seems to delight in making it difficult to understand what to buy and how to pay. I'd recommend a re-read of Krug's "Don't Make Me Think", if only for the title.

Perhaps provide just one purchase option, not buried in the text and available in more places than an obscure chapter. I'd also like to see a buy-now button that delivers a crafted PDF. That's a tangible asset, and could command a decent (fixed) price from readers.

I think the author doesn't want to scare people away, but on the other hand if nobody knows how to buy... A book with a similar business model Game Programming Patterns [1] also does this poorly, I think a simple "Like this? Buy our print edition and support the author" link at the end of each chapter would be fine.

[1] http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/architecture-performance-...

I don't think it is the same case, have a look at this:

http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

If the goal of listing out the worst-converting referrers was, at least partially, in order to shame the users of those sites into throwing Matt some money then it, uh, worked. I tossed him $10 -- not exactly a significant sum, but still > 0.

Paying for content is weird. I don't have any ideological issue with it -- I spend a lot on eBooks, I shell out the monthly fee for Spotify, Hulu+, HBO Go, and a bunch of other things I'm probably forgetting.

And yet -- while I'm confident I'm watching more TV + film, listening to more new music, and reading more books than I ever have before, I'm still paying less. Is that the way it should be, given that it's also a way better experience than it's ever been? I dunno.

I think my tendency is to go with whatever is the easiest and of least fuss [^1] -- very rarely, this involves actually paying a specific dollar amount for a specific product.

I hope things like Patreon and Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) continue to grow. I want a world where great content like Practical Typography can be supported with pure revenue, but that's never going to happen until both the UX and number of those revenue streams meet or exceed the convenience and ubiquity of advertisements.

In the meantime, I encourage more great content creators to "guilt" me into giving them money. Given that I've grown comfortable with paying $12 for a cocktail [^2], I think I can grow comfortable with shelling out some cash for internet authors as well.

[^1]: I suspect this is a habit shared by most HN'ers.

[^2]: I mean, only so comfortable. But Canon is so good.

I don't think the intention was to point out the worst converting referrers. They were the top referrers, which also happened to be poor, though I suspect there were some less popular even worse referrers.

Popular referrers not converting well may simply be a truism.

I clicked solely because of the subject given by the title (i will help a friend of mine publish a web-based book). Don't care at all about typography, but ended up impressed by the author's opinion about the web. I respect and am grateful for his inteligence, even though I think his suffering a little bit from analysis paralysis on the monetization. He could be testing strategies aligned with his terms. And not spending a whole month on this

The thing is someone's running a typography blog, but they're trying to act like a pundit at the same time.

If you haven't noticed, being a talkshow pundit it kind of a fad. Kind of like The Young Turks, David Pakman, etc.

If you like politics and being a critic so much, I think the author should keep it on a separate blog.

I think he's probably a good person, but him putting divisive politics into the mix really distracted me.

I'm glad you feel the same way I do. I find his opinions witty and incisive, but detracting from the meat of his content.

I feel this way about his payment page too. It's involved to figure out the payment options and decide what to do. I count 10 options among his suggested 5 methods. Compare this to when I'm curious about a movie on Amazon. I see one price with one call to action.

I'm seeing at least two prices on Amazon for every movie: new and used.

And that's only if I have already searched for a specific format.

So in reality there are at least four prices: DVD and Blu-Ray, both new and used.

And most of the time I'm also seeing Amazon Instant Video. Buy or rent.

That makes at least four prices in the usual case, most of the time six prices.

This is true. Despite the number of choices, what Amazon has going for it is that I'm a repeat visitor and their pricing plan is consistent for movies. I've long ago decided what I want. That might change as I, say, upgrade from DVD to Blu-Ray or downsize my possessions to go digital, but in general it'll stay the same for months or years. Further, those are mostly commodity formats, so I'm used to deciding if it's worthwhile to spend my money by comparing to other vendors' pricing.

In the author's case, his product and business model are unique. There may be other "pay as you wish" eBooks elsewhere, but none with quite the same mix of fonts, donations and eBooks. Consciously or not, I think the author has made it more difficult for me to consider if and how I'd want to pay him compared with Amazon (or O'Reilly for a closer product).

For anyone looking to monetize a project like this, and avoid all the crass and imposing advertisements the OP rightfully complains about, I highly recommend reading The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer.

Wherein, amongst much else, the author identifies Hacker News and four other sites as huge source of non-paying visitors. He speculates about the effect of just banning referrals from these sites.

It surprises me and my observer bias. I visited, read the book, and bought the fonts long ago. Used them as my go to web fonts quite a lot. Also a very nice book.

Hacker News. I can’t say I understand the purpose of this site, founded by venture capitalist Paul Graham. I have two guesses. One is that it’s like Reddit for programmers, but they can claim that using it is work, not goofing off. My other guess, since it has no ads, is that it acts as Mr. Graham’s panopticon into his community of interest, as Cerebro does for Prof. Xavier. Anyhow, whatever bored programmers are spending their money on, it’s definitely not me.

lol That sounds about 90% right. In my experience most people don't even blink if they see a programmer with HN open.

I have managerial endorsement to read HN at work for the explicit purpose of keeping up with whatever trendy framework-of-the-week the devs are next likely to ask ops for.

Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a new Butterick book. I bought Typography for Lawyers a few years ago and learned more than I expected to learn about en/em dashes and quote usage; information that probably ought to be part of any middle school keyboarding class curriculum.

Does seem a little absurd that there's no "buy book" link in the header, footer or side-bar -- and that the typography choosen for hyperlinks are so broken that I had to read a few paragraphs to realize which section(s) of the black, non-underlined text was clickable.

Not wanting to nag I can understand, eschewing practical UX/UI and refusing to inform the reader that there is a way to pay... not so much.

I'll do some reading on it at some point in the future and may pay something, but it seems like I should make a point of going back to it from this article rather than a simple saved bookmark.

Getting redirected to: http://practicaltypography.com/blacklist.html

Luckily found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810014540/http://practicalt...

> Openness has benefits. It also has costs.

What costs? Seriously. The bandwidth costs of a traffic spike on HN are negligible, so what exactly is the downside of letting in the "hordes?"

Having come across this book the other day, I'm currently working my way through it and was planning to pay once I finished.

Now I won't. Insulting your customers is no way to do business.

I don't think he means "costs" in the economic sense (i.e., more money regarding hosting costs), but a more general idea of cost. A guess: He claims that Apple's business is based on selling expensive stuff to a wealthy audience with lots of disposable income. By making its products more exclusive (that is, less open) Apple can get more money out of them. Selling cheap iWatches, in contrast, would be more open but would "cheapen" the brand, meaning they would lose status (and eventually money) in the long run.

As the "insulting your customers" bit, I'm not sure someone would qualify as such before actually paying for the product. If anything, the actual customers (those that paid for the book) come out of this post proud of themselves, which I find pretty clever.

But the conflation with Apple is fundamentally flawed. Yes, Apple sells high-end products (and he makes a "high-end" website). But Apple doesn't ban you from coming to the Apple store just because you don't match their "standards"—that's elitist and rude.

As for insulting your customers, people are customers before they necessarily buy something. If you greeted everyone who walked into your store with a slap on the face, I doubt you'd get much business even if they aren't technically "customers" yet.

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