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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

I wish the title was more descriptive (“which type of programming?”) or that the introduction said something about the direction of the book.

As it is the only reason I would have for continuing is that I already wanted to read it. But “it’s a book about programming” is not much of a sales pitch.

I guess if you love the style that is the reason to continue?

Scrolling to the end, a better title might be “An Introduction to Haskell” and you need to provide your email address to read more than the first few pages.

Sigh.

I find the grandiosity hard to resist (“a whole type of programming, wow, sounds neat!”) but the author really seems to want to take us for a ride first.

Edit: After he takes your email he asks for 5 euros to get access. Scammy.

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Wow. "Sign up to read more. You will have immediate access ...", followed by an enter-your-email box. Do that and you immediately hit a paywall. No "immediate access" for you.

That's ouright fraudulent, and I'm flagging this submission for it.

Is is a paywall? It looked as though one could opt not to pay a thing.

I'll come back when I'm ready to pay.

Yup, also annoyed by the dark pattern. To add insult to injury, below $20, it removes the option to pay with a card, and only allows bitcoin - interesting approach to tax, perhaps! Whatever the reason, I don't use bitcoin, and even if I wasn't already annoyed by the bait and switch, I wouldn't be bothered jumping through so many hoops. What a shame, the content looked as if it might be good, but no chance of me giving money with that level of disrespect for the reader.

Thank you for your input. I'm sorry you felt this, I'll try to improve the user experience. I'll appreciate any ideas you may have about how to improve this.

I am glad you enjoyed what you read, though :)

I see you've changed the footer from the prior version ("Sign up to read more. You will have immediate access to over seventy chapters, to all future chapters as soon as they are published, and to a digital copy of the full book once it's complete").

This is a step in the right direction, but hiding price until you sign up remains problematic, while the "I want to read more!" button for email submission is disingenuous.

Ok, I see you've added some text in terms of "Buy your copy to read more" which is a start (although it's probably too far from the email capture for people to associate them, and it doesn't stand out from the rest of the body text). But if you want to be transparent, include the pricing there. And if I'm really going to think it's transparent, don't ask for my email without a) really needing it (i.e. as part of a transaction I've signalled clear intent towards) and b) making it clear how it will be used (in normal sized type!)

For me, the bottom of that page could be something in essence like "Buy the book now for a 'pay what you want' price and get immediate access to X content." I'm not sure you'd need much more (email can come as part of that process, and I'd ditch the bitcoin only payments for certain levels - just simplify it and if you need the bottom price to be slightly more to cover card fees, just increase the price to cover them).

Put it all front and centre - if it's a commercial book, that's fine - don't try and hide it, show the value it has and make it very easy to give you money.

I think you have some very interesting ideas, thank you for your feedback. I'll be improving the sign-up process taking these comments into account :)

Interesting! So I’m not the author, just the submitter. No relation to the author.

I understand how you see the payment/signup process. However it didn’t even occur to me that people approaching the site would see it that way :) I found it engaging and charming with a haze of mystery. There’s a useful lesson here.

I’m 100% confident the author doesn’t mean to defraud anyone at all, in the slightest.

As I find the contents speak quite deeply to me, may I ask you to see how the author responds and reevaluate? I think this is first and foremost a labor of love and humanistic ambition.

Thank you for your kind words! And I am happy you appreciate it so much :)

Maybe it is an introduction to programming using types? I read some of the text, but I couldn’t figure out if this was really the spin or not.

Hi, I'm the author of the book. Thanks for your input :)

The book is not free, this is not a paywall, and it's not a subscription: You are buying early access to the book so that you can start reading it before I am finished writing it. As soon as the book is complete, you also get an official digital copy of the entire book (PDF, mobi, epub, etc). The book is growing quite rapidly, it's currently over 50000 words covering many topics, so far mostly related to type-level reasoning. I will be adding a table of contents soon.

The way you present things at the footer does makes it sound like you're simply asking for an email subscription. It might help to be more open, ie. "this book is a work in progress", and to display the price before asking for contact details.

I just made some changes that should make this clear. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this!

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