Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlisboa | Hacker News Reader

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Honestly, I think people will disagree with me on this (due to some vague "you don't have to buy it" argument), but it's just too dishonest to me. This is possibly the biggest rip-off in pricing of any technical book I've ever seen.

If you pay $39 you get 8 fewer chapters than the actual full book. And it's online only, so no paper printing or publisher overhead. For $89 you get a video and some extra chapters (that really should be in the book you paid for in the first place). If you pay $289 (which is an absolute absurd price for any book) you get exactly what you used to get with books 10 years ago: a book with all its intended chapters, a mailing list, a glorified IRC channel and a code repo. Except, again, it's still not even a physical book (so why so expensive?).

If you pay the "Training" package ($749) you supposedly get superior in-person mentoring. Except it's not really done by the authors. It all sounds like some Tai Lopez scam.

I don't want to diminish the amount of work it took to make this book, or the quality of the authors. I'm sure it's incredible and it seems a pretty massive book. But I just don't understand these sort of things when it comes to professional programmers who write books. Supposedly they want to spread this technology they care about and want people to use it. We as programmers get paid very well, we're not in need of money. Book revenue is probably not their main source of income. So why price it out of everyone's range? You're not gonna reach nearly as many people as just selling it at a reasonable price.

I'll preface this with the fact that I completely agree with your sentiment.

> it's still not even a physical book (so why so expensive?)

I have never written or published a book, but my understanding is that the cost of writing the book far outweighs the cost of actually printing it. Human time and knowledge is way more costly than some paper and the effort of a machine that spits out books by the second.

> If you pay $289 (which is an absolute absurd price for any book)

This offer and especially the in-person one seem like they are targeting businesses. A lot of places will pay orders of magnitude more to have someone work directly with their employees.

Honestly, about $93/hour is on the cheap side for in-person training. (I'm not saying it's good training or even close to worth it, just what the landscape looks like)

Edit: actually, it would be cheaper than $93/hour since I'm not taking the other things into account. Let's say the book and all the other stuff realistically make up about $150 of the price (I am guessing the $289 is just trying to get you to buy one of the surrounding tiers). That's actually $75/hour for the training.

> I have never written or published a book, but my understanding is that the cost of writing the book far outweighs the cost of actually printing it. Human time and knowledge is way more costly than some paper and the effort of a machine that spits out books by the second.

Usually physical books are said to be expensive because publishers are the ones holding the rights to them. They pay the authors in advance and try to recoup the cost later, with prices as high as the market will bear. The publishers have some fixed overhead in payroll (for editing, typography, art), printing, marketing, etc. Add to that the risk of the book not being finished by the author and the publisher's profit margin and it goes some ways to justify their pricing (or at least it makes it understandable). The authors then get only a slim percentage of the sales (if at all).

In this case the book isn't even finished, the full proceeds go to the authors (or so it seems) and the readers are expected to advance the money themselves to offset the costs of writing it. The overhead is vastly diminished, there's no publisher, the authors incur no risk, and yet the price is much higher. Makes no sense.

> We as programmers get paid very well, we're not in need of money.

Speak for yourself.

Would you feel better if they wrote 2 smaller books instead of 1 whole book, and the premium package included 2 books? WTF is "book" anyway? It's a web publication.

The cost of a book is in the IP, not the printing costs.

What is the maximum non-absurd price for a book?

Why do you think the authors are the only experts who can lead a useful training?

Which cost-effective GraphQL book should we buy instead?

You know, HN could really do without the person who constantly tells everyone how well-off we all are. Learn economics. And then hold your tongue next time.

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