Comment by Teapot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teapot | Hacker News Reader

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I'm thinking that people that cant afford, or thinks that 50$ is overpriced, are correct. Just as those paying for it are also correct. Just as those that would pay even more. Fixed prices is a tradeoff that is needless nowadays. Try a better way. ● Spread the book far a wide on torrents everywhere. Make the Book also freely downloadable from your site. ● This maximizes the number of readers. ● This maximizes the number of readers that wants more books. ● Tell them that that next book is planned, it will cost this much to write. Donate here. BitCoin, Flattr, PayPal, etc. (It's no more begging then begging for 50$ per book)

The upside is far more readers and thus far more potential payers. And variable payment makes it affordable for everyone. The cost of writing is also payed in advance, no more worries about how the book may sell.

And finally, zero piracy. =O

You just described Kickstarter[1]. :)

I personally like this approach because it doesn't rely on distribution as a business model anymore. By the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's 2012 and we're still forced to pay for flipping some bits because an industry thinks it deserves to be saved from having been made obsolete through technological progress by ridiculous and increasingly draconian laws.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/

What about people who are wanting to make money off their one book? I'm not saying I disagree with you, but not every author wants to constantly be writing books, some people just write one on a topic of interest then leave it at that.

Free startup idea: Something that will sell content, like http://kout.me/, but, instead of money, you ask for a (verified) email address beforehand. A configurable amount of time later (a month if it's a book, three days if it's a video, etc), you send the "buyer" an email, asking them to donate if they enjoyed the content, and make that process as easy as possible.

I know I've wanted to donate many times for things I got for free, or for books that were handed down to me, or whatever, but there doesn't currently exist a good model for this. I like the "pay what you want" model of leanpub, but I think you would get even more revenue per thing if you made it free to read and based it on the honor system.

Anyway, it sounds like an interesting experiment.

And no publisher or any intermediary to rip off both the author and the readers.

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