As a fellow grump, I totally agree - even to my own financial detriment. But you are exactly right - that ad page isn't for you at all. The mailing list and fr

As a fellow grump, I totally agree - even to my own financial detriment. But you are exactly right - that ad page isn't for you at all. The mailing list and free content is for you. You hopefully buy based on your relationship with the author and aren't going to be convinced by any ad copy anyway. They just hope you'll ignore or forgive them for the annoying ad copy and not unsubscribe. That ad copy is aimed at the less-engaged customer - say a project manager at a large nameless consulting company somewhere in Germany or whatever who doesn't really care about topic X but was told by their boss to research topic X and has a training budget to buy a book on the topic (which they may or may not even read). Notice also how every one of these pages will have an absurdly priced $800 bundle option. First, some people at companies who have training budgets will buy it because to them $800 vs. $100 is a rounding error when it's all just free money anyway. And second, having an $800 option makes the $100 option seem incredibly reasonable (when you are essentially asking someone to pay $100 to download a PDF).