4 ms·

> A real (financial) pull of publishing a book via a monthly, paid newsletter is the higher revenue per customer. A customer won’t pay more than, say, $40 for a

> A real (financial) pull of publishing a book via a monthly, paid newsletter is the higher revenue per customer. A customer won’t pay more than, say, $40 for a book. But they’ll more likely pay ~$120 by paying $10/month for a year. See also how Steven Sinofsky is publishing his book series Hardcore Software on Substack with the option to pay up to $300/year to get a final, printable PDF edition of the series once finished. I paid $100 to read this series for a year and one of my friends went for the $300 option. Wow, this sounds awful (for the customer). Is that where publishing is going? $120+ for a book?

klelatti 4y ago
Is anyone else surprised that Sinofsky, who must have made - at a minimum - tens of millions of dollars at MS, feels the need to charge at all - let alone $300 for a pdf - for his memoirs. It’s almost as though he doesn’t want people to read them.
- akudha 4y ago
  feels the need to charge at all lol. Bill Gates' book on climate change is selling for $14 (Kindle version) https://www.amazon.com/How-Avoid-Climate-Disaster-Breakthroughs-ebook/dp/B07YRY461Y https://www.amazon.com/How-Avoid-Climate-Disaster-Breakthrou... I can understand charging for hard copy, but why does someone worth 100B feel the need to charge for digital version of his book on the most important topic of today, climate change? Even if 100,000 people buy it, that is what, 1.4M? Bill must make more than that in the time it takes for him to drink his morning coffee? That said, it is his book, he can do whatever he wants with it. He was kind enough to make the PDF available for free for college kids, for a while... https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/How-to-Avoid-a-Climate-Disaster-giveaway https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/How-to-Avoid-a-Climate-Dis...
  - klelatti 4y ago
    I suspect for Gates it might have been a condition of getting the publisher to promote the hard copy version. If the pdf is free then hard copy sales would be much smaller. Still he could have paid for the promotion etc. I guess that Sinofsky thinks he has a very niche audience who can well afford $300 so they he might as well get them to pay.

klelatti 4y ago

Is anyone else surprised that Sinofsky, who must have made - at a minimum - tens of millions of dollars at MS, feels the need to charge at all - let alone $300 for a pdf - for his memoirs. It’s almost as though he doesn’t want people to read them.

akudha 4y ago
feels the need to charge at all lol. Bill Gates' book on climate change is selling for $14 (Kindle version) https://www.amazon.com/How-Avoid-Climate-Disaster-Breakthroughs-ebook/dp/B07YRY461Y https://www.amazon.com/How-Avoid-Climate-Disaster-Breakthrou... I can understand charging for hard copy, but why does someone worth 100B feel the need to charge for digital version of his book on the most important topic of today, climate change? Even if 100,000 people buy it, that is what, 1.4M? Bill must make more than that in the time it takes for him to drink his morning coffee? That said, it is his book, he can do whatever he wants with it. He was kind enough to make the PDF available for free for college kids, for a while... https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/How-to-Avoid-a-Climate-Disaster-giveaway https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/How-to-Avoid-a-Climate-Dis...
- klelatti 4y ago
  I suspect for Gates it might have been a condition of getting the publisher to promote the hard copy version. If the pdf is free then hard copy sales would be much smaller. Still he could have paid for the promotion etc. I guess that Sinofsky thinks he has a very niche audience who can well afford $300 so they he might as well get them to pay.