Show HN: I wrote a very niche ebook about GTFS public transit data
gtfsbook.com
gtfsbook.com
As I think about it more, a simple restructuring might not be enough for that kind of price. $30 is more than the retail price for a lot of 300+ page technical books (years ago I wrote a 400 page book with a print version that retailed for $30).
As far as the pricing goes, my rationale was to price based on the value it can provide and then take into account how niche the topic.
Some of the content in there took me many many hours to figure out for myself (so thousands of dollars at an hourly rate).
Offset this with (in my opinion) a fairly small pool of potential buyers, this seemed about the break-even point on the project.
On a side note, you can get $5 using the offer code 'metro'
Damn, I read this after I'd already bought the book!! ;-)
And your price is fine.
"The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way."
http://data.ratp.fr/fr/actualites/article/finale-de-lopendat...
We have now moved the route-planning part to a server in C++ but we want to move it back to the client using something like Xamarin/C#. Any thougths on this?
Will definitely buy the book! (No Paypal, though?)
As for my book, I'm selling through Gumroad, which I believe only allows credit card payments.
It was really a horrible hack that took into account only lines and stops (no trip times, transfer times, schedule, etc.) but as a simple visual app, and in the context of a hackathon, it worked.
It was even featured as "Google Map of the week" on the Google Geo blog before it was even showed to RATP
http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.fr/2013/08/interactive-m...
But now we need to "muscle up" the routing part and so are leaving JS completely (however if the data can be reduced significantly it would be interesting to go back to it someday).
OTP is much too big to ever migrate on a mobile device; will definitely check out rrrr; what do you use yourself?
The version currently accessible only deals with the Paris subway, but in the very near future the new version will have all modes for Paris (Metro, Rer, Train, bus) and for a few other cities in France.
I don't know what you mean by "small local buses"?
What's the name/address of your app?
We had a few trips that were non consistent (the average speed was something like 150 km/h - 93 mp/h) that we couldn't do anything about and they refused to integrate those data.
Several bus stops were also too close (they were apart of a narrow street) and were generating warnings every time.
I wish I had this book back then.
Side note: my book is about consumption of GTFS feeds rather than generation of them
Sales have so far covered my direct expenses (domain registration, cover design, copy editing), although I kept these costs as low as possible.
Profit margin can only be determined by the value I put on my time. It will take a little while to cover this but the GTFS spec isn't going anywhere so I'm confident this book will be relevant for quite some time.
It also covers the fact that many agencies interpret the spec differently and explains things to look out for.
The final half of the book shows how to optimize the data from a feed so it will perform more efficiently in an SQL database (for instance, showing how to reduce the number of points in a shape)
In actual fact: - I wrote the first half of the page in Apple pages - I couldn't cross-reference so I moved to Word for Mac - This worked well, but I couldn't export the PDF with internal links - I converted to LibreOffice - This exported with external links
To create the sample, I then opened in Preview, deleted all the internal pages, dragged in the "call to action" page, then saved.
LibreOffice worked well for the most part, although there were a few little funky things that didn't work how I wanted them to (e.g. justified text puts extra spacing between letters as well as words. Also, indexing a word sometimes makes the alignment go all screwy, for some unknown reason)