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Comment by andrewheins | Hacker News Reader

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!

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> 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.

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