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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.
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).
I want the Humble Hooker Bundle.
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. 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
Cheap hookers from foreign countries whom Notch already paid $10k for and about 250,000 people before you have had for a buck?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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*
I don't get people's fascination with these crappy little things that won't even let you leaf through a book
Why would I want to leaf through a book when I can perform an instantaneous search, jump directly to any bookmark or instantly open a book at any page?
or do any of the number of things that make dead trees so much more valuable than digital ink.
Such as?
"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?
The same point as being able to carry around more music than you can listen to in one sitting. Choice and convenience. If I get an urge to read something, I can pop it right up. If I need to reference something, I can pop that right up too.
Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
No, but some of us live in apartments, studios or houses that are not large enough to fit an entire library and some of us have room but want to use that space for better purposes. Also, as stated above, there is the issue of convenience. If I am going on a trip somewhere, I don't have to spend time picking out the books I want to take, I can just grab my reader and have everything available when I want it and if it's not on my reader, I can easily download it.
eBooks have many benefits over paper books aside from what I've already said. You never have to worry about yellowing pages, faded ink or annotations/writing/highlighting on pages. eBooks allow you to change font sizes, font styles and zoom pages. eBooks never disintegrate with age and you can easily keep backups if anything happens to your reader. eBooks can be lent or given to other people, anywhere in the world, at any time without any concern about them damaging or returning your property.
The only "benefit" of paper books is that they are human powered instead of battery powered, which is a dubious advantage when you have battery life measured in weeks or months.
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.
You mean a computer? Because they read eBooks as well.
Oh, then what's the point of doing so? Are you homeless and unable to store books anywhere? No?
Then where's the advantage?
Clearly you've never moved your books out of your mother's basement. Once is all it will take to make you appreciate not having to haul seven bookcases-worth to a new home (or even just move them because of a backed-up drain).
Now that the tech is finally usable, and certain readers have backlights (so you can read in bed with someone cuddled up against you asleep), they really are nifty little devices. Especially since I'm out of space for more bookshelves.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Hey bro, don't talk about our mom like that.
An index/ToC.
eBooks have those too, you know. Even better, eBook ToC and indexes can be linked directly to the material that they reference.
Physical bookmarks
How many physical bookmarks can you realistically stuff into a paper book though? With an eBook, I can create as many as I need.
Pages are numbered, you know.
Pick up a book and instantly open it to, say, page 392 without having to flip through a bunch of pages looking for the right one. With an eBook, I can type in "392" and have the page up right away.
Music isn't as consuming as a book. You can jump around a bunch of music at random, listening to different artists and songs, and thus the "music library" makes more sense. A single book is more linear and even if you read several books at once, it takes time and you don't need more than a handful of books.
That is only true if you're reading novels and only if you still haven't finished it. It takes me only a couple of hours to read most novels, so spontaneously deciding what to read next is that much more convenient. And what about reference books like a dictionary or programming manual? Do you read those cover to cover or do you use them to find specific information on demand?
Also, those handful of books are still going to take up more space and weigh a lot more than my thin and light eBook reader.
Like what, a fucking hugeass television? I'd rather line my walls with books, thanks.
That is one possibility. Or perhaps furniture. Or exercise space. Or paintings. Or computers. Or a piano. Or plants. Or an aquarium. Or storage. Or your kid's stuff. Or any number of things that one might want to use the space for.
You also conveniently skipped over those who may not have the space in the first place.
You would need to go on one longass trip to need to carry enough books for it to be an inconvenience.
Again, it is a matter of choice and convenience. Spend time selecting the few books I can physically carry with me or just grab my reader and be able to read and reference what I want, when I want. In addition, every paper book that I pack means that much less space and weight for other things. I travel frequently, often times internationally, and love being able to have my books with me.
I don't either because I can take care of my books. I have ancient fucking books that look almost as good as the day they were printed, and they are well read.
Unless you have every one of your books encased in mylar or something, there is little you can do to prevent page yellowing. With paper books you have to make a decision as to whether or not you want to keep them in pristine condition or if you want to be able to highlight passages and jot down notes. With an eBook, none of those are issues.
Books are too important to entrust them in fragile little devices controlled by others.
Book are important, which is one reason I prefer eBooks. With paper books, even a spilled drink or dirty hands can destroy them. If anything ever happens to my reader, no problem. I've all of my books backed up on my PC and online.
And I don't know which readers you've seen, but I've used a number of different brands/models and none of them are controlled by anyone other than the owner of the device. My nook handles both DRM and non-DRM books in multiple formats. I can even root it if I want to customize it, but I haven't felt a need nor urge to do that because it handles everything so well.
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
I think he's referring to the time Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm , ironically enough. Amazon had sold a version to which it didn't have the rights, so when it discovered the error, it deleted everyone's copies and refunded the cash. While Amazon later promised to never do it again, they do have the capability to do so, which makes people understandably nervous. That is one of several reasons I went with a Nook instead of a Kindle - while B&N probably has the same capability, at least they haven't exercised it yet.
I think my favorite thing about my Nook is that I can get old, out-of-print, and barely-extant scifi books that are acknowledged classics but will probably never be printed again - often for free, because the copyright has expired. My Nook has over 200 ebooks on it, from Gutenberg and Baen and other sites, and I've only bought seven of them, I believe.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.