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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

I want to buy it but feel annoyed by these payment options.

  Tier 1: $39 - Full book when released and early access
  Tier 2: $89 - Tier 1 + updates for 2 years + extra chapters
  Tier 3: $289 - Tier 2 + free updates for life + more extra chapters

This is an oversimplification with only the things I care about. The actual packages include more stuff. What really annoys me is why would you call tier 1 the full book and say tier 2/3 has "extra chapters".

I just want all the chapters + early access + updates (2 years is fine). And I want to pay less than $100. Am I being too entitled? Buying books used to be simpler.

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Yes, it's like some horrible IAP concept for books.

Normally a technical book costs around 40-60 EUR and one gets all the chapters. Updates are called "editions" and are published when there's demand and the information has become outdated.

Also "free updates for life" usually means free updates for several years and then "new product" is released with entirely new pricing and "old product" is deprecated. New and old here being a different revisions of the same thing.

Usually yes. There are some exceptions with technologies that evolve a lot. The free update feature of the ng-book 2 for instance really paid off for me. But that was included in all the "Tiers" for free, it was a $39 book.

Amazon/Google books, this page not available for preview, unlock for $5 per page. Only pay for what you need! PAYG works out cheape!r†.

† limited-time treasure-chest special - unlock all pages for $500!; footnotes and references extra; internet conmection required.

On the other hand, this is the first time I've ever thought "Huh, that feels like too much for a book" (with the exception of textbooks), and I think part of the usual charge-more thinking is that if nobody is unhappy with the price, it's too low.

It's also certainly the case that me understanding GraphQL better will easily save my employer much more than $90 of my time, so I might try to expense it and see what happens....

I'm convinced most of this pricing is aimed at businesses.

With all due respect to John Resig $39 does not get you the full book.

$39 "Upon completion The full book in ebook and HTML formats"

$89 "Extra chapters: Server-side rendering Offline data and mutations Serverless Stripe integration"

Rather misleading then.

Also there should be a dead tree option (even though content gets outdated fast). Personally I'd pay $49 for a printed full book on GraphQL by John Resig.

Creating a technical book is pretty hard (source: I've done it, as well as many others here). You're not just writing the book, but attempting to lead the reader from a point of little/no knowledge, so each step in your narrative needs to build completely on the last. Added to that, you're attempting to write idiomatic, clean and bug-free code to go alongside the writing.

Right now, he's clocking in at 350+ pages with his co-author. A chapter would take me a week to write, basically, so that's about three months of effort already. That's before you've done review, editing, etc., so you're looking at raw material costs of about $40-50k just to bring the text together with code in a reasonable package.

Even on the $89 package, they're adding in interview videos, interactive exercises(!), and a bunch of extra chapters. I doubt that doubles the cost, but it's probably a chunk extra (unless the book revolves around "designing software for interactive exercises", that's more code they need to write). Then on the higher package, even more chapters and videos, plus technical support (which I think is nuts).

They're pitching it as a book which probably isn't helping, but I actually think that's decent value for what they're offering. Are they going to make a profit? Hopefully, but that's going to come down to how many people are interesting in what is really a technical niche topic.

A lot of content is free; good-quality content tends not to be, and I think the world could use more like this. The market will decide, I guess.

I don't think the price matter as much as the fact that this comes across as nickle and diming customers.

I'd probably pay (or expense) $100-$150 for a really good book, with videos, interactive examples, etc. But this pricing just puts me off the whole book as you can buy the "full" book, the "fuller" book, the "fuller" book with support for bugs in it, etc.

I also expect a book to be reference material that I can share with colleagues as needed (we have an office library), so team pricing per seat comes across as quite money-grabbing.

To be clear, I'm not at all criticising the quality of the content, and I'd be willing to pay good money for good technical content. I just don't think this pricing is very respectful of customers.

Some 10 years ago I bought a huge book about Ruby on Rails for $50. It had at least 400 pages.

This last week I ordered "App Architecture", also for some $50, and I was amazed by what I got - a tiny book that fit in a small envelope...

And now $89 for a PDF?? I love books, but no thank you.

which of those two books was better though? if I'm getting a voluminous tech book with a generic 'name of technology' title it's a pretty safe bet that a third of it is useless to me.

If you considered it an online training course vs a book, would you consider it a fair price?

No, because an "online training course" in full text is a book.

Agreed, the pricing has put me off.

Another thing I feel is odd is the charging for technical support on the code samples. Either the code doesn't work, in which case that's a bug in the _book_ and should be fixed without paying for that, or it's a failure on the reader to set up the right environment, in which case the issue is likely to be minor and could probably be answered on Stack Overflow.

If it was support implementing the ideas in real world projects that would be worth a lot of money, but that doesn't appear to be what they are selling.

I think it fair to charge for technical support. Of course you could turn to Stack Overflow, but some people can and will pay someone else for assistance.

I feel the same. Had to actually take time to understand the different tiers, which should be immediately clear in my opinion.

Also, I'm a sucker for having all the chapters, and interested in, for example, the chapter about Redis caching. Do I have to pay $289? Way too much...

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