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Comment by adamc | Hacker News Reader

I have a very negative reaction to sites that require an email to get something of unknown value.

Automatic no.

That's an interesting take, given that the landing page demonstrates its value with some example pages, and the index of topics.

I can skim the chapter titles and get a pretty good idea of exactly what value there is. I'm not sure what's holding you up.

I think that's true, but I'm also one of the people that's going to bounce from that.

While several chapters have mildly interesting titles, what I've come used to from these kinds of offers are mostly just rehashed blog articles from other sources. I remember one extra special case about an Elixir "book" that pretty much just copy-pasted the official getting started guide.

Generally speaking, these kind of hurdles don't inspire confidence in the quality of the content.

But you can see the actual content. 6% of the book is on display on the landing page. I think you should just judge the quality of that instead of inventing ways to make assumptions based on other factors.

Why not a series of blog posts?

To me, the reader, what value does sharing my email or it being in The incredibly less flexible "ebook" format have?

> Why not a series of blog posts?

It seems pretty self-evident that they wish to exchange something of value for something else of value. This is a pretty common activity among humans.

Unfortunately, as we see here, "instead, why don't you do even more work to change it to my specifications and then give it to me for free" is a common counteroffer.

I am already writing every tip as a blog post. But those blog posts take a full day to write as they are much more detailled compared to the short summary in the ebook. My time is limited like yours, and the short ebook is the best way to spread the knowledge: You get the information now, and I'll notify you when those full articles are written.

Hey man, thanks for the book.

Don't forget you don't owe these guys what they're asking for. You've done the work to share your knowledge, they can do the work to gather it.

Take a shot every time a HN pedant types "Why don't you just X".

You, the reader, don't have a choice between a series of blog posts and an emailed pdf.

Well, for example, intro doesn’t say which SQL flavor the author is targeting. As a MSSQL user I wouldn’t want to share my email in exchange for MySQL tricks

Your definition of value differs from that of others'.

Yeah, of course it does. Fully agree. I don't understand the point you're making.

I haven't offered my definition of value. I just said that you can clearly determine the value to yourself by reading the landing page, it has the relevant information required (besides actually reading all the content).

And what of values inherent in privacy concerns?

It just seems like you're applying a very narrow view of what can be considered "value" here.

The "privacy violation" is not the value of the book, that's the cost to you.

We're not discussing the values inherent in privacy concerns, we're discussing the value of the book, and whether or not you can guess at its value before you give the guy your email.

You're talking about something else.

No, you're talking about something else. Obviously OOP's concern is about the value of the book vis a vis what is demanded of the recipient in exchange for the book.

I have a negative reaction to sites that require email.

In this case, the value was made pretty clear in the homepage.

I was happy to only have to exchange my email for what appears to be a very high quality resource - the author is either extremely generous or undervaluing their knowledge!

The value is clear if you look at the landing page. There's some interesting techniques in this book, for sure. (I've worked with SQL databases for over 20 years. Several of them I hadn't seen.)

Providing an email address seemed like a fair trade.

I'm okay with an email address (can just use a throwaway), but I get annoyed when they want you to fill out name, occupation, etc.

Just make something up.

What about a throaway email?

can someone share the pdf here for folks who don't wanna share their email?

I wouldn't.

Author is offering their work at a given price. That price is email. It may be worth it to you or not. Requesting a pirated copy of it without paying the price is not something I encourage,given so many of us here are well to do knowledge workers whose live being depends on people paying for our work.

(Not to mention, it's same or less work for you to create a temp email account, vs somebody else doing the work of signing up, sharing their email, and uploading and hosting content for your convenience). Yes yes information wants to be free and all that, but this is just lazy :-D

agree. Thanks for changing my perspective

You say that, yet every paywalled news article posted on HN quickly gets a web.archive.org or archive.is link as a top comment. What is the fundamental difference with this?

I've bounced back from so many walled articles that now I genuinely blame the OP (of that post) for not including a non-walled link.

HN should have a tag for walled contents.

To be honest. Just subscribe and the next time I wrote a free article and share it with you unsubscribe. I don‘t spam you. Ans I don‘t mind when you only want to grab the ebook.

The problem is not unknown value. It’s unknown cost. Until I know everything you will ever do to me with my email I don’t know the true cost. What I can guess—given the thousands of precedents I’ve encountered over the years—is that the total cost will be time taken from my short life to fend of yet more marketing and yet more marketers. For comparison, if you ask me for currency, I know the total cost of ownership. Usually, for me, a few units of currency are a rounding error compared to the value I place on time.

The total cost is how much time it takes to google "temp email" and then click on the first link and use that temp email to get the book. It should take about 2 minutes, maybe even less time than writing out your comment.

Sure, same as the total cost of a movie is how long it takes to type the name into a torrent search and click the magnet link. If the OP wanted a bunch of dead temp emails, why ask other people to input them. But, not my point.

I think on HN a good assumption is posters want to discuss, to get feedback. Also not a bad assumption the notion of temp email will be news to absolutely no one at all here.

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