From my perspective: • I like writing in Notion. It feels like I'm getting more writing done than I do elsewhere. • It hits the sweet spot as it allows me to A) write & format code-focused content, B) link to other (sub)chapters, and C) create compelling guides thanks to the variety of "building blocks". • It's nicely designed and permits customization (blocks, callouts, colors, font families, etc) while sensibly constraining you so that you don't go "too far" with the design. • I can assign read-only permissions relatively easily (I wrote about how I automated it here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-published-a-notion-e...). • Last but not least, I studied Janel's journey on publishing a Notion resource (basically a dashboard) on Indiehackers: (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/newsletter-operating-sy...) and saw that it works! So I did my own thing.
From my readers' perspective: • Ppl usually don't read Elasticsearch guides on a kindle on a beach in Southern France. They do it on the computer while integrating / debugging something. So they pull up the online Notion workspace, search thru it, and (hopefully) gain some insights. • Since it's online, it can be updated / extended / typo-corrected at any time. • The handbook includes images that won't work on kindle and videos that don't really work in PDFs. • Last but not least, ppl can't really share my work online. Sure, they can do screenshots, save the page as html, copy the text etc, but it's not as straightforward as dumping a PDF on dropbox.
BTW I'm tracking my ebook "mini journey" on Indiehackers too, if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/the-elasticsearch-handb...
P.S.: I do plan to eventually move my handbook out of notion and create my own member-only workspace that'll look similar to Lee Robinson's blog (https://leerob.io/blog/monorepo-lerna-yarn-workspaces). But the emphasis is on eventually ;)