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Comment by rpm4321 | Hacker News Reader

I actually clicked "Buy Now" before I realized this was a physical textbook and cancelled. To me, it's almost inexcusable to market this sort of text to this type of audience and not have a digital copy.

Shouldn't the barriers to entry be much lower for the author to get this out electronically?

I see that the author is responding to comments here, so if you're like me and will buy it if it comes out electronically, please let him know in the comments that he can count on your purchase.

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I have the PDF version ready and will setup a shopping cart (ejunkie?) very soon (like tonight) because several people asked for this.

Reading math in print is really good: you can flip back and forth through the pages.

How much should the PDF cost? 29$ sounds a bit steep for a PDF no?

Shouldn't it be cheaper because it's an ebook? Free to distribute and higher profit margins.

You don't need to pay for a physical copy, so it would make more sense to charge so you get the same profit from each, or maybe a bit less.

Pricing based on cost (with fixed "this is a fair amount of profit") is a terrible pricing scheme.

patio11 talks about this a lot. Here's a podcast where he talked about it (more in the context of B2B software, but many principles still apply): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

If you scroll through his comments, you'll see many instances of him telling people to charge more for things and explaining some of this stuff news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

Assuming you're interested in even compensating yourself for the time you're spending on this, I wouldn't go too low. Maybe base price of $19, and free when you order the physical book? That would still give you some wiggle room to do sales and give discounts to people who ask. Many people will happily pay that much, and if you were to go as low as, say, $9 (closer to 8 after transaction fees), that's really not that much, and you'll need to sell a lot to really make money and be able to keep doing this.

I have few suggestions on this matter,

1) If a book is interesting and its priced around 15$, I would purchase it no question asked.

2) I hope you can release a EPUB/Mobi version of the book in the future and make it available to people who bought the PDF.

3) This might be pushing it but if someone has purchased the ebook and wants to get the paperbound after certain period of time, it would be sweet if you can offer major discount on paperbound for those people (look at Oreilly for an example)

4) Similarly offer ebook version of the book with the paperbound copy, almost every publisher does it these days.

Hi Ivan, glad to hear it. You can count on my purchase.

Regarding pricing, yeah, you probably want to go cheaper than your print version. Maybe $19 or $9, depending on how much profit you are expecting to make on the physical copies.

To be honest, you're probably best off a/b testing the price, as it can be very surprising how consumers will react to various price points. I've seen situations were significant price hikes result in much higher sales, presumably because of the implied value of the product.

For reference have a look at the % price difference for other book sellers, like O'Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596802363.do

I'd be selling it for $24 for Ebook (and make it available in PDF/Epub/Mobi to cover all readers), $29 for print, $32 for Print + Ebook.

Please listen to this guy's suggestion of making the price for both only marginally higher than the price for the Print version alone. One of the quickest ways to kill my interest in in purchasing a book is by expecting someone to pay a non-trivial amount of money for a digital copy after they just purchased a hard copy at full retail.

As far as pricing the ebook alone, I think it should be somewhere around 14.99 to 19.99.

If it helps, I am probably a good example of your target customer. I didn't take my education seriously until I was out of high school for a few years, and now I find myself trying to catch up with all of the stuff I should have learned when I was younger.

Why is it acceptable in 2013 to charge ANYTHING for a digital copy when also buying the dead-tree?

Good point. Every book should come with a free digital copy, but unfortunately the standard practice seems to be to offer a trivial discount when purchasing both.

The digital copy offers something the physical copy doesn't, e.g. portability. Some people might be willing to pay an incremental sum for this added benefit.

If it were a one-off download, it probably wouldn't be. But I quite like the system O'Reilly uses: $5 for an ebook if you own the dead-tree version, because you can download it as many times as you like, in all different formats, and they maintain it with errata updates etc. for life.

The lifetime ability to download the most-current version of a book in any current format is, IMO, worth a few dollars more than a free but unmaintained ebook in what may very easily become a legacy format within a few years.

I'd just like to say that if the physical book included the PDF (for no extra cost) I'd be all over this!

Are you also planning on doing an ebook + physical book combo as well ?

For what it is it seems pretty reasonably priced as it is. I wouldn't drop the price too much.

Also you mention formats in another comment. It'd be nice to have a choice. ePub is easier to read on some devices, but then PDF is easier to mark up (I'm thinking Goodreader) later on, which is nice for this sort of thing. Anyway, once you have an ebook version that's another sale from me :)

I'm not great with math, so seeing your take on it is exciting. I think $29 for the print copy is a good price, and $19 for the PDF (and I wouldn't go much lower than that).

I think after a few iterations of this book, this should be a real money maker for you.

BTW, the language is a bit strong, and may distract from the message. I have two daughters in University but I won't buy your book for them until the language is toned down. There are probably others like me as well. Worth considering.

I'd buy the book if the PDF were included.

I haven't used this but it might be helpful for you https://gumroad.com

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