Comment by korny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by korny | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure they have the right price point. Many people will impulse buy something of interest for under $10 - psychologically, that's a small amount of money. I bought Louis C.K.'s comedy show for $5, as it's an amount of money I don't mind wasting - it's a small risk.

However at $24, you'll get a number of keen backbone fans - but you won't get all the folks who are interested in backbone, and spine, and ember, and a pile of other frameworks; it's no longer a small enough price for an impulse purchase, so they'll stick to free tutorials.

The same thing applies to lots of other online purchases - I'll buy a vaguely-interesting phone app for $7, but probably not for $15.

The price point where people switch from "cheap as my daily coffee bill" to "the cost of a decent meal" will obviously vary from person to person, and from country to country. But I suspect that $24 is over that point for a lot of people.

(me, I'll probably buy it - but I'll think about it for a lot longer than I would at $5)

Hey korny,

I totally agree with you that we're outside the impulse-buy price range and we'd sell more copies if we charged less money.

However, our goal from the start was not to make a tutorial for people interested in backbone. Our goal was to make a more in-depth collection of great patterns for intermediate to advanced backbone developers.

Hackers are smart, they can read the docs and figure out the basics. We wanted to share our experiences with working with backbone for an extended period of time.

Our book is a great resource for people who would use backbone professionally and at $24, that's cheap.

Check out the excerpts, and read the reviews, play with backbone, learn it. When you're ready to bet your app on it, pick up the book :-)

xoxo ngauthier

I'm sorry, but it's not a great price for a poor university student. I have played with backbone and spine some, but putting hacker cleverness aside, books are a great way to cut down the traversal of learning space. It saves time to read distilled knowledge from those who blazed the trail.

That said, best of luck with the book. I respect that you have specific plan in mind.

Edit: Seriously!? Why am I being downvoted over my financial status? Please point out what I did wrong.

Just curious, did you try contacting them and ask for a student discount? That works more often than you'd think.

Thanks for the feedback.

That seems like a more appropriate option, but it didn't occur to me. I don't mean to act like an ass.

I've been in school too, it is expensive (especially now).

However if my text books costed $24 I would have been insanely happy, most cost well over $100. So if the book is good perhaps its worth it.

I looked at the excerpt. The typesetting is terrible for a book priced at $24. See the side by shot of rails recipes and your book. Also in your book the code is not syntax highlighted making it quite difficult to read.

The code is also formatted such a way that the codeblock splits into two pages for just a closing brace (page 44 - collection view)

For $24 I expect better typesetting. Right now it looks like a pirated OCR book.

The content may be great (I haven't read it) but to me a book is difficult to read if it is typeset like this.

This helped me decide not to buy the book. Thank you.

I agree that the PDF formatting leaves something to be desired. We are using the OSS git-scribe (https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe) toolchain for producing PDF, Mobi, and ePub. I have already put a ton of work into the toolchain to make it better (http://japhr.blogspot.com/search/label/git-scribe). Most of that work, however, was to help get the Mobi and ePub versions up to snuff.

I plan to take a week or so in the very near future to again focus on improving the toolchain. Hopefully some, if not all, of your valid criticisms will get addressed.

Forgot to link the comparison screenshot - https://img.skitch.com/20111216-d3fajpw313y3e4f3cgs74einr1.j...

As an open source user, I appreciate that you have improved the tools. But as a potential reader of your book, I want you to use whatever tools necessary to get it to look good.

Even when compared against a non-professionally converted pro Git PDF, this books does not fare that well. https://img.skitch.com/20111216-enxfwjcgkgsu2pcndkcaimd3q.jp... The code block has no padding. In general the typography is not pleasant. If you look at the git book, the italics do not stand out as much as in this book.

Backbone documentation is presented beautifully. So when you are aiming to compliment it, the bar is also a bit high :) (Granted it is HTML but I do think a lot can be done to make this book more pleasant to look at)

You're saying this isn't for beginners and you set a price of 24$ for it?

I bet a lot of advanced backbone devs will also not buy it because of the price.

While the content may be of good to high quality, the pricing is a bit off.

I'm currently writing an eBook teaching Backbone.js in CoffeeScript, of about the same length as Recipes with Backbone. I'm still mulling over how to price it. Does anyone want to make a guess about the potential size of the market? Am I correct to think, the bigger the market, the more cheaply I can price it and still make a bit more than minimum wage for the time I'm putting in? Any further comments or suggestions about pricing are welcome.

As long as the content is good $24 is cheap for something I'd consider reading to expand my skill set.

Agree. This looks like what I have been looking for. I was about to buy it, saw the price and thought I would lurk here to see the reviews first.

I think books like this should not be "impulse buy". It's an investment. And it saddens me to see that authors effort is less and less valued.

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