On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make writing worth their time.  This is why you have to pay for almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the rare exception to the rule.

I see, but I thought the money was for the D Consortium/Organization.

Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every time you see a "click bait" title.

I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad.

Bubba.

> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.

I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook.

I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1 million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad blockers is rising.

How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then...

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:29:56 UTC, Bubbasaur wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make writing worth their time.  This is why you have to pay for almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the rare exception to the rule.
>
> I see, but I thought the money was for the D Consortium/Organization.

If there's almost no money coming in, does it matter where that pittance goes? ;) I wasn't talking about the D foundation, but a paid blog that would get writers to produce good articles online.

> Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every time you see a "click bait" title.

The dirty little secret is that those sites make little to no money, relying on funding from dumb VCs before they go out of business, like the Gigaom tech blog.  Vice has done well, and looking up why now, I see it's because they mostly focus on video and made deals with TV channels and cable companies, not exactly replicable for most writers.

The best way to illustrate how inadequate ads are is this chart, that shows what happened to US newspaper ad revenue over the last 15 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg

That little blue squib at the bottom, that's online ads.  Newspaper revenue used to be 80% from ads, now they're all putting up paid subscription banners, because ads just don't work for most sites online.

> I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad.

Ebooks definitely lower costs, so they _should_ be cheaper.  As for piracy, that genie is out of the bottle, all you can do is mitigate it.  But paid books still sell well, and that's only because of the complete lack of imagination of people to try paid online models, such as paid blogs.

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:55:16 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.
>
> I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook.
>
> I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1 million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad blockers is rising.

Wow, that's pretty good traffic.  I've been reading your IAP/ION spec and was surprised how clearly it's written, guess that's why.

> How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then...

Paywall for 80% of the posts, with the remaining free to sample, and the reader puts in $5-10 and gets charged 5-25 cents from that balance per post clicked on.  That metered model is much better than subscriptions.  If I don't read any posts for two months, I don't get charged any money from my balance.  There are ways to get content behind a paywall indexed, paid sites like the WSJ do it.

On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>>> Simple, a blog that you pay to read. :) It's amazing to me that
>>> people still continue to pump out books, such an outdated form,
>>> simply because it has an existing payment model in place, rather than
>>> trying new paid models online.  Simply churning out ebooks or the
>>> equivalent is all they do, when so much more is possible online,
>>> everything from pay-per-post to comments.  The lack of imagination is
>>> simply stunning.
>>
>> I agree. A website / blog allows links to videos etc. and it can
>> be expanded over time, and indexed by search engines.
>>
>> Have you considered using LeanPub for this?
>
> Never heard much about them.  Looking at their site now, I like that
> they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while
> they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but
> don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end.
>
> A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than
> a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog
> posts and turn them into a book!  The only reason is that books have a
> long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still
> selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers
> yet.
>
> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick
> around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.

I've got two books through leanpub.
It is ideal for a magazine or books.

If you want help, please let me know!
I would be happy to help for it.

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 01:33:22 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>>> Have you considered using LeanPub for this?
>>
>> Never heard much about them.  Looking at their site now, I like that
>> they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while
>> they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but
>> don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end.
>>
>> A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than
>> a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog
>> posts and turn them into a book!  The only reason is that books have a
>> long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still
>> selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers
>> yet.
>>
>> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick
>> around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.
>
> I've got two books through leanpub.
> It is ideal for a magazine or books.
>
> If you want help, please let me know!
> I would be happy to help for it.

Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub?  I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog features like the ones I've mentioned above.

On 23/12/15 3:26 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 01:33:22 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>> On 23/12/15 5:10 AM, Joakim wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 15:33:50 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>>>> Have you considered using LeanPub for this?
>>>
>>> Never heard much about them.  Looking at their site now, I like that
>>> they focus on getting chapters in front of readers right away, while
>>> they're being written (which almost every writer should be doing), but
>>> don't like their emphasis on producing books at the end.
>>>
>>> A categorized/tagged blog with comments is a much better experience than
>>> a static book with a table of contents and index, yet they import blog
>>> posts and turn them into a book!  The only reason is that books have a
>>> long-standing payment model in place: it's as though everyone were still
>>> selling buggies because there are only buggy dealers and no car dealers
>>> yet.
>>>
>>> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated ideas stick
>>> around, only because people cannot imagine anything else.
>>
>> I've got two books through leanpub.
>> It is ideal for a magazine or books.
>>
>> If you want help, please let me know!
>> I would be happy to help for it.
>
> Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub?
> I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control
> the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog
> features like the ones I've mentioned above.

I would be happy to help with leanpub. With regards to pretty much anything.
Ok so here is the thing about leanpub. You control the manifest.
You can then once published do what ever you want with the generated files.

For a magazine or book leanpub is great.
If you really want to go the paid blog route, I'm sure we could kit out our own Markua (markdown) to html in worse case scenario.

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 02:36:38 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
> On 23/12/15 3:26 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> Are you offering to write for a D blog or to get it set up on leanpub?
>> I'd never use an external platform like leanpub where I don't control
>> the source, as one of the main points would be to add new paid blog
>> features like the ones I've mentioned above.
>
> I would be happy to help with leanpub. With regards to pretty much anything.
> Ok so here is the thing about leanpub. You control the manifest.
> You can then once published do what ever you want with the generated files.
>
> For a magazine or book leanpub is great.
> If you really want to go the paid blog route, I'm sure we could kit out our own Markua (markdown) to html in worse case scenario.

Heh, I think you've missed the point of what I've written a bit: I'd _never_ publish a book or magazine, even if it wasn't in print but primarily online.  I consider that almost as bad as telling me to write it on a parchment scroll (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll). ;) I'd only publish on a tech blog where I control the source and could continuously add paid blogging features like those mentioned previously, which almost nobody is doing today.  As such, I find no use for an external platform like leanpub.

It wouldn't take much effort to set up a paid blog based on vibe.d, one which you could add new features to over time.  The issue is that I'd have to find D devs who want to write for it, as I'm not the right person to write about D (I'd probably edit articles and run the tech/business side).

I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into this.  I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.

> I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.

Or - maybe D is exactly the right use case. D doesn't already have a ton of available material, but still as a decent size community.

I'd say the hardest part is to get information about those parts of D which are not documented. I find the D docs for Phobos pretty hard to read. There are very few explanations to the methods and classes.

The "read the code" dogma is not very helpful to beginners in a new language or API.

On Wednesday, 23 December 2015 at 03:05:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I've been thinking about contacting various D devs to see how much interest there is- I mentioned that I contacted one guy already- but I wasn't sure if I myself wanted to put time into this.  I really want to put these paid blogging ideas into use one day, but maybe D isn't the place to do it.

I don't think it would be worth your time to focus on D in general. If you want someone to pay more than a couple dollars a year, you need to offer something specific, and it needs to offer a direct, immediate career benefit. Web development with D might work if done right. Probably the better thing is to go into it with a low price and a goal of learning. Then you can move on to a more profitable market.

On Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 21:09:31 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:

> Writing a focused book of around 100 pages can be done in 3-6 months. If more people chip in, it might even be faster.



There are these books floating around where various programmers actually come together to write them. Each author take charge of a section. They go like:

Problem: How to rename all files in a directory.
Solution: ......


They take advantage of common tasks and make them into a book. These books really sell. D community/Consortium can do similar if is worth it.