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Comment by billpatrianakos | Hacker News Reader

I feel guilty. I just got the book for free and I feel like I need to justify it. I really respect Raganwald and I would love to pay and he deserves it. I took it free because the honest truth is that business is really, supremely bad right now. I have a total of $60 in the bank and a few grand in bills due plus some other awful things. I justify (maybe wrongly) downloading it free by assuming the book will help me and when business picks up again I'll buy another copy for as much money as I can muster to the point that I'm almost uncomfortable with the price I pay. I promise this. And I'm sorry.

Do my other freeloaders feel guilty? Or are there none? Or are there some but don't feel bad at all?

Edit: Just read the "Why You Need a Degree to Work at BigCo" section and already it's worth a lot more than the asking price.

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I only have one vote, but I think it’s meaningful in this case :-) If you’re in no position to pay for it, I want you to have it for free, and I’m glad that you went ahead and read it. If you do find it helpful, that would make me very happy.

This is a book I’ve already written, so it’s a sunk cost for me... It’s all blog posts that others have found useful or meaningful in their search for decent work with decent people at a decent wage. The more people find good work, the more we all benefit. If you’re out of work, you can’t click through ads to buy stuff, you can’t employ others, you can’t subscribe to services.

Helping you be healthy, happy, and financially secure is a win for us all.

Also, I’ve recently been “talking loud” about copyright cartels and the importance of being able to copy bits. Giving this “book” away is an attempt to do a little walking the walk instead of just talking the talk. I also considered creating a book solely to be distributed free on torrents. I may still do that.

p.s. Some people have gone ahead and paid for the book. Thank you! Remember that if you have a budget for books and you don’t mind doing a few extra clicks, buy one of my other books and download this one for free, you’ll get two books and I’ll be just as happy :-)

I have a book I published using Leanpub and I set the minimum to be $10. Some people pay the minimum. Some people pay the suggested price of $15. Some have even been as generous as to pay MORE than the suggested price.

If I ever decide to give away my book for free for a limited time, I would not feel bad about people giving me $0 when they could give me whatever they want.

I am in agreement with Raganwald in that I just want people to read it and find it helpful.

I wrote a short Python tutorial (http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/) which I packaged up as a book in a few hours and put on LeanPub. I used to sell it for $2, but the LeanPub guys changed the pricing structure to minimum/recommended, so I set the recommended price at $5.

People have been buying it for $5 ever since, and I've even had some $8s and $10s. I even include a link to the tutorial right on the book page, because I don't think it's worth even $2, but apparently people do!

Anyway, I love LeanPub so much.

Thank you for understanding. I know things will pick up and I promise to buy a copy when they do. I hope one day I can repay the favor. Of course you didn't set out to really do anyone Any favors here but it certainly feels like it. Thanks for the book. I am reading right now and I'm glad I got it.

I love his type of content publishing. It works the same way as the Humble Bundles.

If you give something away for free, I'll take it for free.

If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me a reasonable suggested price(this book), I'll pay the suggested price.

If you give me the option to pay $0, show me what others are paying(humble bundle), I'll pay the median.

If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me "bonuses" at certain price breaks (kickstarter, humble bundle), I'll pay at the most attractive price break.

It actually makes a ton of sense to adopt these kind of pricing structures because people actually pay!

> If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me a reasonable suggested price(this book), I'll pay the suggested price.

I actually didn't download it at all because of that. A free book to throw on my Kindle and maybe look through on a slower day is great but setting the price to zero felt like ripping off someone who contributes to HN and spoiling his metrics. I bookmarked it though so there's some gain from this tactic.

That same thought process went through my mind (kids, mortgage, cars, start up, yada yada). I decided to enter the zero, though, for two reasons:

1. Even though it isn't cash, it is a way for me to tell Raganwald that I appreciate his efforts, both the book, the blog, and the community. Of course this is not as valuable as cash and I'm really not trying to rationalize not paying, but I can only give what I've currently got.

2. If I gain some particular value from having read this, I am always free to remunerate the author in the future based on that value. I can't do that (and perhaps could have missed an opportunuty) if I'm not subjected to his ideas first.

It is interesting the psychology that goes into this kind of thing. I contrast this with the Humble Bundles, where I don't download them, because my available time for gaming is so small that I cant even claim my download is a show of appreciation for the work.

Peter from Leanpub here. If you're down to your last $60, please don't feel guilty not paying anything! Come back later and buy the book (or one of raganwald's other books) if you want. (On the bestsellers page, his other books are currently in the #5 and #9 spots.)

The reason we did the sliders this way is to encourage people who have extra disposable income to pay more. Since the Leanpub royalty rates are so good, we felt we should show what the author gets right on the purchase page. That's why we subtly change their color as they are dragged up and down, as well as live-updating the royalty, etc. So I'm really happy since this shows that they are working as intended :)

It worked very well. Knowing how much the author gets and seeing it go up and down makes me feel empathetic and makes me think how I'd feel if I were the one selling. I always find that when payment pages are set up this way that I'm not being "sold" something but instead like I'm being offered something useful. It also makes the whole thing feel more human if that's the right word. Payments are almost like adversarial type situations where one party is trying to take money that you're protecting. When it's set up like this it helps break down that attitude and shows you how both you and the seller are helping each other.

It would be great to have the ability to post-pay. I can imagine finishing the book and realizing that it was worth $20, and wanting to pay more. In this case if I come back to LeanPub there would be a list of books I selected to postpay, so after I finished reading them I could judge the true value and pay that (or add to what I have already paid).

That's a really good feature; we'll add this to our queue. Thanks!

I'll second that. I think a post-pay model is really useful. The only problem is getting people to come back to pay for the thing.

Combine it with other features (Write the author, discuss the book with author and readers, rate the book) and invite the reader on the last page of the book.

Not sure how well that would work in practice but it resonates well with me. What hooked me was the title and the word free, the advantage with free is that I don't have to make up my mind on how much it is worth. My first reaction was that I could, since it was free, just grab it and see what it was.

But the instant I came to the site I felt guilty. I ended up paying the suggested price only because the suggested price was sensible (if the suggested price had been more I'd probably would have paid less) and because leanpub seems awesome (just found out about it). Since I know nothing about the book itself I didn't take that into account when buying, it could of course be worth much more.

EDIT: DRM-free and giving me multiple formats to choose from (and not forcing me to select one) is awesome and is one of the reasons I really wanted to buy it. Otherwise I would have had to strip the DRM first (I don't accept DRM on e-books that I buy, even if it makes me a criminal).

I fully intended to take it for free, but I paid for the book because the asking price is under my impulse-purchase threshold. Writing a book is such a time-consuming and difficult process $5 seems like a tip.

I by no means think that means everyone else needs to pay something for the book -- but I'm in a position to pay $5 today, and the book looks interesting, so it's worth the charge.

Same here. I'll pay $5 for almost anything, and I'm certain that if it's half way decent I'll get a lot more than $5 worth of value out of it.

I downloaded it for free only because I saw the link while sitting in bed and didn't feel like looking for my credit card. I appreciated that the followup email had info about paying for the book by buying another of raganwald's books.

Yes.

Typically, when someone makes their creation available for free with an optional donation, I will donate a few dollars to encourage other content creators to do the same.

It is odd, though. I am not so much supporting or applauding the specific content creator, but more encouraging future ones to make their payments sliding or optional.

For instance, I buy every Humble Bundle that comes out, but have never played the games.

I feel the same way. Pretty much the only things I buy online are those offered for free, in an effort to support content creators who use such a scheme.

Don't feel guilty, appreciate that it was given for free. When things turn around, pay it forward. Doesn't even need to be in the same method - buy a homeless person a hot meal.

I'd say what you should do though, now that you got the thing for free - is actually read it - then leave feedback.

I agree with you on the guilt evoked by the site design.

I immediately second guessed whether or not it was worth downloading and ultimately decided I would be willing to pay if it proved valuable. I reviewed the table of contents and saw the chapter "The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career" so I decided to download it. I skimmed the chapter, decided it wasn't worth my money, deleted the pdf, immediately unsubscribed from the website, and then came back to HN and wrote this comment.

Is the design good because it urges a person to pay? Probably. Is the design dangerous because of the violent reaction people, like myself, get from the feeling of guilt it triggers? Probably.

Thanks for the candid feedback.

We don't want violent reactions of guilt; sorry about that :( There is enough guilt in life. Please don't feel any because of Leanpub.

What we were going for was more of a "little nudge", if you have the disposable income. That's why the slider goes from a pastel green to a neutral "meh" grey (instead of a red, which would make you feel bad) when you go lower, and to a nicer, darker green as you go higher.

On second thought, I guess if we wanted to be evil about this we could have some graphic where you have a dinner plate full of food, and as you lower the slider you're removing side dishes (and say if you go free then the entree goes too), and if you raise the slider you add say a glass of wine, a dessert, etc -- now that would be a fun design to A/B test :)

If I were you I wouldn't be feeling guilty. Its not the design that made me feel guilty. It was knowing that the author deserved to get paid for the work while not paying. So in my case I got something valuable for free. I think it's great to be able to get it, read a bit, then decide its not worth money and not pay if you don't find it valuable. But while this is great, I think there's danger on both sides. The author is giving it for free, allowing you to preview and decide the worth. Awesome. But if you've gotten it already for free and decide its worth your money, like in my case, what's to stop you from never going back to pay. You have to find the link again (which admittedly is super easy to remember -good job) then go through the payment process. There's not much of a barrier to paying after the fact but there still is one. I promised to pay but how will anyone ever know?

So what's the best thing to do? Give it away free and hope the honor system works or force payment and have unhappy customers? I don't see a best answer here, unfortunately.

I've mentioned a couple of times on HN, but just one more: increasing prices means you deal with less pathological customers. What does a pathological customer sound like? They get something for free and then want their money back.

They also feel as other people have a moral obligation to comport their business affairs to the specifications of the pathological customer, and this is a very nonreciprocal obligation, because pathological customers will do absolutely nothing to change their desired behaviors as a result of a business relationship.

More important people (author, publisher) have commented on this already, so this is nothing but a very humble additional opinion here:

I think you have the best reason to take the author up on his offer. You cannot purchase it. He offers you a way to get it for free. That's a good match.

For me, I came to that site lead by the title. I like raganwald's contribution here and expected something like a free 'Learn Python the hard way' style thing. Or a blog-articles-in-pdf. With maybe little (publishing!) effort and just a heads-up for the people here.[1]

Seeing that it is actually a book in progress I left. I cannot pay for purely technical reasons (No credit card, this country doesn't want to give me one and my home country revoked mine when they didn't see any incoming salary for roughly a year). But I earn a pretty damn good salary here and got money in the bank. So _I_ would need to feel guilty for free-loading if I just grabbed the book.

You really shouldn't. And good luck anyway.

Edit: 1: Actually, after rereading raganwald's comment I think that is pretty much correct. But the site says 'Note: You are buying an Alpha Book. New essays will be added on a regular basis, and you will receive updates for free.' so I don't understand how this 'sunk costs' works in this case?

Because it was asked: I downloaded it for free. No guilt was felt.

He wouldn't have made it free if he couldn't afford it, and we wouldn't have chosen free if we could have paid.

I have not heard about Roganwald until this thread, and feel this is a great opportunity to learn about him. I will check out the book for free, and if it offers value for me (teach me stuff i did not already know), i will happily go back and make a contribution.

sweet! the best thing about this book is that it led me to homoiconic! https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic so much goodness there.

I paid $10, so you can consider me as having paid for you if it makes you feel better.

I got it for free, because I don't see me ever reading it (but I'll put it on the Kindle just in case), and I wouldn't have ever gotten it otherwise. I don't feel guilty, if I like it I'll buy some other of his books.

I got it for free too. I am not equipped with any online payment method yet (I know, it's already 2012 :( ). So I can only be very grateful to the author for making it possible for me to read it too.

Thank you Regenwald!

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