Slashdot Mirror
Humble eBook Bundle Lets You Pay What You Want For eBooks
Following on the success of the various Humble Bundles for DRM-free video games, the organization has just launched its first Humble eBook Bundle. It includes Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, Invasion by Mercedes Lackey, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners, both by Kelly Link. If you choose to pay more than the average (about $11 at this writing), you also get Old Man's War by John Scalzi, and Signal to Noise, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The books are available in PDF, MOBI, and ePub formats, without DRM. As with all the Humble Bundles, you can choose how much you'd like to pay, and how the proceeds are split between any of the authors and/or among three charities.
Throw in some Steam achievements and you got yourself a deal.
Next: Humble Movie Bundle
After that: Humble Media Bundle
See a pattern?
I've been needing some good locally-saved reading material in between reading new 40K rules and my fantasy author of choice. I'm willing to back this on spec and hopefully it'll take off (maybe with certain bundles focused on certain types of books, such as sci-fi, or psychology).
Did you type it out: ten dollars? It will definitely accept a $10 payment as long as you use numbers like a normal person. Perhaps you're complaining that they don't accept the payment option of your preference? It would be nice, I admit, if they could set up a system to accept credit cards directly instead of going through payment processors, but they do give you a choice of processors. They're really pretty flexible.
Seems that book bundles are valued 50% higher than game bundles... nowhere near the same quantity sold yet, though :(
I bought Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen on dead tree media a while back, and I thought it was fantastic. This bundle is worth it for that title alone.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
+1 badass. High 5!!!!
1. EVERYBODY goes through a payment processor.
2. Performing the "checkout" yourself is not cheap. Storing and processing credit card data requires not-cheap security measures.
3. Going directly through a first-party processor is not cheap. There are rather large minimum cash flow requirements, which are simply infeasible for "pay what you want", especially when you're only selling something periodically.
Pay what you want, support charity, get your product built!
Pay what you want! If you paid for web development separately, it could cost thousands or even millions of dollars for larger corporate sites!
You choose how your purchase is divided: Developers, Charities, or even Us!
Can't wait for the upcoming "Humble Education Bundle" and "Humble Grocery Bundle". This is the future.
As far as I can tell, these are all popular and published authors and books. Shouldn't a Humble eBook Bundle consist of new and unknown authors, in the same spirit of Humble Indie Bundle?
Except for one of those Humble Indie Bundles that included Psychonauts. Great game? Sure, but hardly Indie.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Just to say Kelly Link's are more then just DRM free, they are CC BY-NC-SA:
http://smallbeerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Kelly_Link_Magic_for.htm
http://smallbeerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Kelly_Link_Stranger_Things.htm
And Cory Doctorow's is at least CC BY-NC-ND:
http://craphound.com/pc/Cory_Doctorow_-_Pirate_Cinema.html
IMO they should, as a nerd backed enterprise, have build at least a basic parser for simple formulas into the payment system. nothing fancy obviously you need to get a float to the payment op but doing some simple parsing and supporting predefined constants (pi,fi, e) can be easily done even from the frontend.
-- no sig today
While kind of cute, it's dangerous to play games where customer money is involved. Much safer to just assume anything non-numeric is a typo than to build in a minor calculator for people to play with and then deal with a bunch of chargebacks from people who made math mistakes or actually did have a typo.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Let's see, I like Arthur C. Clarke, so I'll pay $20.01: "2 0 . 0 !" (accidental shift+1)
Oops, now my account is overdrawn by $2.3 * 10 ^ 18...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You should be able to see a handful of reasons why that would be a very bad idea. Aside from the extremely momentary novelty that you can do it, there are so many potential problems with that which would make it nothing more than a flat danger.
donate higher amounts.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
My calculator reckons 20 factorial is approximately 2.43 * 10^18, which means you would have had to have $1.3 * 10^17 to start with to end up being only $2.3 * 10^18 overdrawn. Which would make you the richest person on the planet by some margin, now if you could spare me $10^7 which I'm sure you wouldn't even notice, I won't tell everyone how rich you are. ;)
Sorry, I don't have and won't have one of the little crappy e-reader devices where I can't even read a fucking book as intended.
It's sad that dead tree books are on the verge of death these days, and it happened extremely fast. I don't get people's fascination with these crappy little things that won't even let you leaf through a book or do any of the number of things that make dead trees so much more valuable than digital ink. "But I can carry around hundreds of books in my purse/backpack!" Good for you. Now read all those books at once. You can't? Oh, then what's the point of doing so? Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
Then where's the advantage?
The epub of Signal to Noise, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean is shit, and not worth the diskspace. Totally unreadable.
To compensate, they're doing their best to not give out any information about the books. I watched the video hoping it'd have a short description of each book (like there is with indie game bundles) but it didn't. I clicked the books hoping to see the back cover text but wasn't able to find such. Sure, they provide you the first chapter as a preview... but I don't want to read a whole chapter of each book just to find out the basic premise (Fantasy? Scifi? Steampunk? Alternative history? World torn by war? Are they thrillers or what? Are they meant to be light read or intended to make you think?)! I'm sure I could google with the name of the each book to find out but I won't bother. The next time they want me to spend my money on products, they should be prepared to put some very basic information about those products on the site.
Someone linked StoryBundle in a sibling post and it seems to do things right... I'll have to look into it and perhaps buy that one.
No I don't. Sorry to burst your bubble there but what were you thinking about?
Obviously you aren't dealing with that sort of data on the payment framework, everything is frontend. So where exactly lies the trouble?
-- no sig today
No, not at all actually. People will ever only notice the big fat letters printed on the confirmation dialogue so as long that one is a decimal number you are sure that:
A) people will be warned of the amount they are preparing to donate
B) nerds will be reassured that their esoteric formula got actually accepted by the thick goggled accountant.
Also if you had any success in that sort of stuff you learn to double check with insane donations, because that is the smart money way anyway.
-- no sig today