peterarmstrong

Dear America,

This all sounds complicated and insecure.

Why can you not just do paper voting with simple ballots, like in Canada?

Yes, you have 10x the people, but just get 10x the human counters and scrutineers. Counting is parallelizable.

We run elections and get accurate, verifiable results in the same day.

Ours aren't as nasty as yours are, and we still have better anti-fraud than you do, since every paper ballot can be counted, as many times as needed. And since the thing which is counted is the same physical thing which can be audited, we can always verify the results if anything goes wrong.

You've had some problems with your ballots 16 years ago, and we're not sure why you haven't fixed this by now. After all, you've gotten people to the moon and robots to Mars--surely you'd want a fair, verifiable presidential election? (Especially when one of the two candidates is, frankly, terrifying to all your friends around the world.)

Love, Canada

Hopefully one day textbook prices can return to a sane level, say between $30 and $80. Today's textbook racket (I don't want to call it a market) is obscene.

By the way, another way to get financial support for an open source project is to sell a short tutorial book. For example, the creator of Laravel did this on Leanpub (disclosure: I'm a co-founder of Leanpub) and did pretty well: https://leanpub.com/laravel is #7 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub. (Also, one of the core contributors on Laravel has done even better: https://leanpub.com/codebright is #2 in lifetime earnings on Leanpub.) Similarly, the creator of Trailblazer is doing pretty well recently with his Leanpub book: https://leanpub.com/trailblazer is #9 in revenue over the past week.

Anyway, my point is that even if you're in a niche, if you are the clear expert in that niche (say if you created the framework, or in your case, the software), then a book may be one worthwhile component of a monetization strategy. If you can sell a $30 book to 4000 people, you can earn some decent money. (The royalties on a $30 book on Leanpub are $26.50, so multiplying by 4000 results in over $100K.)

It completely bypasses our system: we earn $0 from Lulu sales. (It was added by Dr. Peng. Leanpub authors own the copyright to their work, and can sell it wherever they want.)

That said, having used Lulu myself in the past (back in 2006), Lulu pays good royalty rates on print books and ebooks, and we recommend that all our authors consider using Lulu or Amazon CreateSpace to produce a print book once their book is done. If you search "Leanpub" on Lulu, you'll see a handful of Leanpub books there.

To help our authors produce print books, we have two features:

1. Print-ready PDF export. Click a button, get a PDF with proper page numbering (alternating sides), chapters always starting on the right page, no cover image (since Lulu and CreateSpace have wraparound cover upload features), etc. I think that most of our authors who have print books, including Dr. Peng, went this route since it's a lot easier than the second choice.

2. InDesign export. Click a different button, get InCopy (ICML) files. These can be given to a designer who is good at InDesign, and he or she can make a beautiful custom-designed book. Our InDesign export is pretty basic compared to the print-ready PDF export, but our hope is that it's a better starting point for a designer than a Word document with a bunch of formatting that they need to throw out.

For us, making the print book production process as easy as possible just adds to the value created by using Leanpub. We want to create more value than we capture, and this helps with that...

Cheers

Leanpub co-founder here. We're really happy with our minimum price + suggested price strategy, and have no plans to change it.

When coupled with our sliders which clearly show the (very high, 90% minus 50 cents) royalties that are earned by the author(s), and with our free update distribution, we get a lot of benefits for our authors, including:

1. When there is a low or a free minimum price, readers who otherwise could not afford a book can get it legitimately. This can help build a community around the book. For example, https://leanpub.com/rprogramming has over 80,000 readers (free + paid), and while it has a free minimum price, it is also our top book by lifetime revenue.

2. Quite often, there is so much extra income earned by readers paying above the minimum price that it entirely offsets refunds. (We have a 45-day 100% refund policy.)

3. Because of the royalty transparency, variable pricing, 45-day refunds and the fact that readers are supporting authors by buying in-progress books, there's a very, very low amount of nastiness. I really like seeing author and reader email; quite often "I love Leanpub" is part of the sentiment, regardless of whatever issue is occurring. (We also sell completed books, but much of what Leanpub is based on is our writing workflow and our focus on selling in-progress books...)

For the young kids here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer

Friendly advice: make sure that, if the time comes, you get a speech therapist sooner rather than later if the speech is delayed too much and the fact of not being able to communicate causes him distress. Early intervention helps so much, so it's great you have a diagnosis at this young age...

I've worked remotely for Silicon Valley companies from Victoria, Canada, and it's great, even though the startup scene is just in its infancy. Same time zone, housing isn't insane like the valley or like Vancouver, beautiful climate, good university, etc. The largest drawback is that once you're ready to do your own startup, VCs are all "Victoria? WTF? You can't build a real company there...", so you're stuck bootstrapping...

Fair point!

You're correct that we're more expensive per transaction than Gumroad, which is an excellent service. Now, for some books, the amount earned above the minimum price is more than enough to make up the difference: our price sliders work really well to earn extra money for authors. The Leanpub vs. Gumroad question is actually a really interesting one; there are other considerations on both sides. (Gumroad is what I recommend for authors who don't find Leanpub a good fit. I know that authors like Nathan Barry make a killing using their own sites for the marketing and Gumroad for the selling.)

You're also correct that one of the main points of Leanpub is the one-click "make all the formats and sell them" approach. We do offer PDF upload for authors who find Leanpub's workflow preferable to more DIY sites like Gumroad.

Specifically, in terms of LaTeX support: we do support LaTeX math, but you're correct that there are some limitations. I'm not sure if the work we're doing on Markua (https://leanpub.com/markua) will help with this or not. I think that it will help with some of it (making equations into figures and referencing them from other places), but not others (probably the alignment isn't good enough). I'd really appreciate it if you could contact me with specifics if you want...

I should have been more precise: yes, they are introductory textbooks which accompany courses. I was defining academic as "it's a textbook of any level" not "it's graduate level only".

Leanpub has also been used to publish work based on dissertations (which is as academic as it gets), and those works obviously have far fewer sales.

The alternative is absolutely not "no book". Academic books can do extremely well as ebooks.

I'm cofounder of Leanpub, and some of our bestselling books (https://leanpub.com/bookstore/earnings_in_last_7_days/all/al...) are academic books about data science written by professors. This includes our #1 book this week (https://leanpub.com/artofdatascience).

These books have free minimum prices, $15 or so suggested prices, and do very well for their authors -- both by royalties earned and by number of copies sold.

The key point here is that if you're typically earning $10 or more in royalties (yes, royalties) per paid book sale, then a few thousand book sales can add up to being meaningful, fast. And yes, this can even happen with academic books that have a free minimum price...

We have this. They're called sports teams.

We like to think of what we're doing as Lean Publishing (self-published in-progress ebooks), not vanity publishing. We only earn money if the author does, unlike most of the scum that prey on authors who wish to self-publish and spend thousands of dollars to get a box of books that sit in their basement.

The Leanpub workflow is totally free to use, and we're making it better all the time.

Now, frankly, I'm a programming book author myself (I've written 3 programming books) and we have tons of programming books on Leanpub -- but I really wish we had a lot more romance and other "genre" books than we currently do. I even went to Brisbane to speak at GenreCon Australia (http://www.genrecon.com.au/) in 2013 to try to jump-start this, but frankly our usability wasn't there yet. We'll get there.

Great! Brian Marick's book on Functional Programming (https://leanpub.com/fp-oo) has done really well; looking forward to seeing more of them!

We want to improve our support for fiction a lot in the months ahead. We're mostly computer programming books right now because Leanpub used to be so hard to use you needed to be a programmer to figure it out :) Most programmers already know Markdown, whereas the idea that you should write in something other than Word is something that we need to explain to people, and that opportunity only comes with traction.

To support fiction properly, we need to add support for paying for instalments, so that you can buy a chapter at a time, etc. Serial fiction used to be a big deal in the 1860s, and it should be a bigger deal now because of the internet.

Also, we're working on a new version of our in-browser editor which will be more friendly for people who don't like writing in Markdown -- which probably includes many fiction authors...

That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)

Congrats on your book! As a cofounder of Leanpub, I'm really happy that you enjoyed using our platform :) And yes, you can sell your Leanpub books wherever you want -- at Leanpub, authors own their work.

Thanks for the suggestion regarding pre-orders. At some point we'll probably add this. It would have to coincide with our also adding store credit, so that we can give refunds to purchases that are older than 45 days in store credit, etc. (Right now we have a 100% "happiness guarantee" where readers can get a refund with 2 clicks, but this only works for 60 days, so we set our refund policy to be 45 days.)

I don't think design is losing its seat at the table: most new apps are nothing but design. But it would be nice if pretentiousness lost its seat at the table.

How about doubleplusunpositivity?

In all seriousness, the line between a valuable piece of criticism and gratuitous negativity seems like a fine line, and one of the things I like about HN is that there is usually intelligent criticism in the comments. This seems like it goes against that...

We integrated Taxamo (http://www.taxamo.com/) into Leanpub, and their posted fees (http://www.taxamo.com/pricing/) start at 20 Euro cents for every EU transaction. Non-EU transactions are free.

In terms of detecting whether the transaction is EU or not, there's a complicated workflow with 3 pieces of evidence etc, but (a) that's what Taxamo helps with and (b) if a bootstrapped Canadian startup can deal with this, presumably so could anyone else.

If you're an author, you can use Leanpub (https://leanpub.com/). We added #VATMOSS support, so you don't have to. We did this since we looked at the situation and decided it was the correct thing to do for our authors, even though we're based in Canada with our servers in the USA, and with no physical presence in the EU whatsoever. We also added "bring your own book" support, so you can just upload your own PDF, EPUB and/or MOBI files instead of needing to use our (awesome, Markdown-based) book creation workflow.

Heh, I remember coding a vertical FlowLayout in 1999 (before that was included) out of fear and loathing of GridBagLayout...

"Burton appointed his wife to be his literary executor, with absolute control over everything that he left behind. Among her first acts was to burn the manuscript of a translation of an Arabic work called ‘The Scented Garden,’ which, with elaborate annotations of the same sort as those appended to ‘The Arabian Nights,’ had occupied the last year of his life..."

Wow, that almost rivals Nietzsche's sister...

At Ruboss, we rewrote Dashcube (https://dashcube.com/) in React, after having performance issues with another JS framework. The rewrite took 4 months, and was totally worth it. We're extremely happy with React...

Leanpub, 1206 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397

(We didn't get any comments or many points, but it's nice to see that afterward we've had a number of Leanpub books do better...)

After 16 hours of no food, eating breakfast is usually an easier sell. But if it's not, force it down anyway.

I've found the simpler solution that works for me is to fast for 16 hours, including the entire flight, and eat breakfast on the plane an hour before landing. Also, I sleep on the plane, starting right after takeoff, with a sleeping pill if needed. This has worked for me in both directions for flights like Vancouver to London (9+ hours). Instead of being ruined for a week, I get essentially no jet lag.

Yes this means turning down all food and alcohol on the plane, and just drinking water.

The idea is that your body has 2 clocks, a food clock and a light clock, and that the food clock will win if you fast and then break your fast (get it?) with an appropriately timed breakfast.

http://harpers.org/blog/2012/03/the-empty-stomach-fasting-to...

http://blogs.hbr.org/2009/05/a-fast-solution-to-jet-lag/

Use Amazon Prime to ship you anti-venom in 2 days.

Mandatory unsubscribe is totally fine, obviously.

But CASL includes making confirmation, welcome and update emails opt-in, or else risking an up to $10 million dollar fine.

Yes, really.

Even if you're not a Canadian business, this will apply to you if you email Canadians.

Yes, really.

Say goodbye to your opt-out email drip courses.