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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

This model blows my mind - I just cannot quite work it out. Have the companies involved - O'Reilly and Humble Bundle Inc - just decided that they're OK with potentially making nothing at all from this, so long as lots of money goes to charity? I mean, it's wonderfully altruistic, and I suppose it could be a lot more complicated than I'm giving credit for (does the goodwill gained by them outweigh the financial hit?) but it's certainly fascinating. How do people decide how they allocate the money? Is it wrong if I feel bad if I don't give all the money to charity?

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It's because they are selling digital items that have no intrinsic value. The likelihood that everyone will do this is low. Most people will just leave the sliders at their default values. And it's good marketing.

Depends on the author agreement. With the age of these books, possibly not, but there could easily be a royalty payment involved. Either way, let's assume they sell 100,000 copies, that's still not that much money and would be in line with their typical CSR giving (very likely, these authors might have waived royalty for charity too).

Humble Bundle is an extremely profitable operation that preys on the altruism of people. They secured roughly 5 million in venture capital funding from sequoia capital.

15% of whatever money you pay doesn't go to a charity, it goes to them. This is not explicitly stated. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle (search for 15%)

This is false, at least, in how you present it. It is clearly stated, and configurable, where your money goes.

When you make a purchase on Humble Bundle, it by default has a divide between the developer or publisher, the charity being supported, and Humble Bundle. You can modify this percentage at purchase time, for instance, by sending 100% of your proceeds to charity, or stiffing the developers if you despise them.

Arguably, Humble Bundle bears a large chunk of the operating cost here, since they have to provide download bandwidth for things like the eBooks and non-Steam-based games. But only asks for 20% by default, from what I can tell. Of course, I'm sure Humble Bundle has done the math on how many people pay the default cuts, and how much they need to stay profitable as a business.

So, no, it's not that Humble Bundle is a charity, but yes, you can get games and books really cheap while supporting a charity.

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