Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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> So it seems that is a published zine where you buy an e-copy for between $5 and $20 with a cute little sliding bar that tells you the author's cut of the money you send (basically 80%) Interesting User interface design.

Yup, 80%. They say that explicitly here: https://leanpub.com/authors. The site itself, LeanPub, is one of the more (if not most) well-known self-publishing outlets, particularly recognizable for supporting "early access" books. I.e. like video games, you can pay while the book is still being written, to access its already made parts and possibly influence its final shape. People sometimes use it for donations too, by setting the minimum price to $0.

The quality is what you'd expect. On a spectrum between a blogpost and an O'Reilly book, most what I've seen is around 30% there.

Other books related to Lisp popped up there too. I remember buying three:

- https://leanpub.com/lispwebtales

- https://leanpub.com/lisphackers

- https://leanpub.com/lispweb

(EDIT: no affiliation with LeanPub; just the way you wrote that sentence made me think you believe parts of this platform are features of the zine, which they're not.)

(Leanpub co-founder here.)

I like to think that some of our books are between 30% and 110% of what you'd expect from an O'Reilly book. They don't have things like indexes, but the advantage is that authors can write in a dialect of Markdown, preview or publish with one click, and distribute updates to readers automatically.

So, many of our books start as 30% or less of what you'd expect from an O'Reilly book, and grow to be as much or more than one.

In terms of the "or more" part, this can include being more specialized than what would be considered marketable.

It can also, however, include being offered as a course: a Leanpub manuscript written in Markua (one of our two Markdown dialects) can also be used as the basis for a course.

To learn more about that, the spec is here: https://leanpub.com/markua/read#leanpub-auto-creating-a-cour...

(And thanks to that bug being pointed out to us, that link should even work well on phones now :)

Thanks for reply!

I realize now I wasn't clear about that "quality" bit - I didn't mean to imply your publishing has quality issues; it was just a statement about the contents of books, based on my experience reading them. I don't find this unexpected or bad either, this comes naturally with lowering barriers to entry and letting more people become authors. I like your service and I believe you're doing a very good job.

Thanks! :)

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