I can't understand some of the comments here saying this is too expensive. Seriously folks, William has put together a great into to Bootstrap for a less than the price of a billable hour and it's too expensive? Sure all the information is out there - if you want to spend a few more billable hours finding it - plus a someone who is just now getting up to speed on Bootstrap - most of the tuts out there are for Bootstrap 2. I think the timing is right. The sample chapter is great. Williams product will hopefully save me many multiples of the purchase price by not wasting time seeking the right information and that is a point lots of people seem to be missing.
Exactly. The complaints are wildly off-base; it doesn't matter whether it costs more or less than a college chemistry textbook; it matters whether or not it will save you more than $60 worth of time.
I mostly write native apps, but happen to have started to make a website for the first time in several years the other day. Having decided to start with Bootstrap, I spent at least an hour chasing down blog posts about using Bootstrap, and then googling to see how things had changed since v2, how people do X and Y, finding conflicting opinions of unknown provenance, etc etc... and was expecting to have to do more of that to finish getting up to speed with Bootstrap (especially since I'm starting with v3 and most of the info on the inter web tubes pertains to v2).
So of course I bought this book. In order to be a worthwhile investment, all it has to do is save me from the hassle having to do that again, one single time. Perusing the site it really looks like it will. Sold!
From an economic standpoint, I don't think that argument holds water. You don't have to support readers the way you do SaaS customers. Is there such a thing as a parasitic reader?
To the author: For a book with plenty of substitutes (as opposed to a presumably specialized SaaS product), I think it's much more likely that the demand curve is extremely elastic, meaning that as price decreases, quantity sold increases much more than enough to compensate for lower total revenue. And since marginal cost of each unit sold is effectively zero, this is all profit.
Add in the fact that since you're early to the party, you could acquire these customers before substitute products hit the market. By the time they do, you could be the established product.
I think Two Scoops of Django [1] got it right. They priced it to move. I bought it as an impulse purchase when they were in beta, and absolutely loved it. I can tell that many, many other people did the same, because I see it cited as an authority all the time on StackOverflow. It's up to "full price" now, but it's still affordable.
+1. Don't change your pricing until the results say you need to. And don't let the commenters here that feel the need to shit on someone's hard work get to you.
I'm on the cusp of buying it - the $59 for the package is probably a bit much, the $29 is alright, but definitely not an impulse buy.
I guess you've done your pricing research - but the consensus, at least on HN, seems to be that $20 is a price most people would just go for, but as you get higher, people really want to know what justifies the higher price. It is a free-market economy, I know, but if you can somehow justify the higher price, then you'll have a lot more sales, and a lot more happy people willing to spread the word.
The fact that most O'Reilly/Pragmatic Programmer/Manning books - which are generally very good quality, well-proofed and technical - are priced around the $20-$30 mark doesn't help things.
Maybe $10 for the book (kindle books about bootstraps are around $5-$10 at Amazon) and $30 for the whole kit? There are so many free templates out there and also 5-10 commercial bootstrap bundled templates for only $10. Although they are not the best designs, but are good enough to learn how it's used and coded with live samples.
I agree with so well documented official documentation, it's going to be hard to sell.
Edit: BTW, there is even Bootstrap 3 video course at lynda.com.
The price is inadequate. I would pay $10, maximum $20 for it, especially taking into account that the subject is well documented in blogs and official documentation.
That's certainly a good point of view. Thanks for the feedback!
I wrote the book exactly to help who finds the official documentation too difficult to grasp as a whole.
I was in that very situation two years ago when I started with Bootstrap, and I thought that people out there will be in the same situation starting with Bootstrap 3 now.
I think it might be a pretty small group of people that know about bootstrap but don't/can't figure out how to use it, and will pay $59-79 dollars for an ebook.
$25 is a reasonable price for ebooks with a large amount of useful content but won't get impulse buys.
$5-10 will get impulse buys but you might not get as much money in aggregate.
$59-70 is ridiculous for any book, to me that is like textbook pricing.
I personally probably would've bought it in the $5-10 dollar range even though I know bootstrap and find the documentation easy to understand.
Best of luck.
Edit: I never made it to your $29-39 ebook pricing which might grab more people, might want to show that there are 2 options better (2 columns maybe).
The problem with the documentation isn't that it's difficult to grasp, but that it's scattered all over the internet, i.e. some useful stuff is on stackoverflow, some in blogs, some in official documentation. It's a good niche for a book, i.e. many people would buy it, provided, that it has a comfortable price.
I like the book and contents, but the price on the site is quite large. A can buy a bunch of tech books on IT ebook sites like Oreilly's for it. I would buy it without thinking for $10, with some thinking for $20, and for something around $30, I will buy only after thinking through about whether I really need it.
Thanks, that's the kind of feedback I'd always like to get!
I had doubts about the pricing until the very last second before launching.
But all in all, I just remembered all the work and passion I put in it, and decided to go on with this pricing.
Now that a good number of purchases are done, I just can't change my mind. So I'll go on, and learn whatever there will be to learn from this amazing experience.
I would have felt better about Ebook pricing if you included the kindle version. I keep my reference books on a kindle with a 2 month battery. My tablets are always out of power when I need them.
I don't know... the code on the book is meant to be read and immediately tried. What's better than a PC / Laptop for that?
That, and the difficulty (for me, at least) to get a decent book filled with screenshots and examples in epub / mobi, is the main reason why a chose to not produce Kindle-ready formats.
Agreed. The pricing is ridiculous. $79 for an ebook, git repositories (which should be on GitHub in the first place!), and a few Bootstrap themes (many of which are open source) is laughable. There's no way in hell I'm buying this, which is a shame, since I'm in the middle of redesigning my personal website to use Bootstrap 3.
the git repositories are there to avoid to copy-paste from the PDF (which is an awful experience) the source code of Part 2.
The bootstrap themes are nowhere to be found because I wrote them for the book and as an example for those starters the book is aimed at.
And for the first day the price is $59, which people seem to be happy with so far :)
Also, there's the book without the extras, if you think it could be useful to you... but I sense you are not a starter, now are you?
Also, you do realize that if people do buy the $79 package that includes the Git repositories, then it's only a matter of time until the repositories end up on GitHub (or SourceForge or Bitbucket, etc), right?
"I guess you are not a newbie with Bootstrap nor frontend design"
Your guess is wrong. If you had put the repositories and themes up on GitHub and dropped the price of the book to $20, I would have glanced at the ToC and most likely bought it.
I spent this Thursday and Friday migrating a pretty complicated site from 2 to 3, and boy it is a pain. My word of advice to anyone reading, do not use v3 for a desktop oriented website unless you specifically desire new hybrid grid system. It doesn't have fixed width elements anymore. It doesn't have truly flexible elements either. Form inputs are now screwed up (flexible) by default, lots of things are screwed up, some examples on the official website are still screwed up. It wasn't worth it, it looks and functions worse than it did, even with a bunch of new custom CSS.
I agree it's expensive, there is no way I would pay that price and I would like to read it. I read a lot and it just feels inadequate to me, I never actually paid that much for a single book. The themes on the pic don't look any great either.
It looks interesting but for $30, there's just not enough meta-info for me as to what all it contains. I'm guessing it walks through the construction of the examples mentioned (landing page, blog). But is there an overview of the different classes, and when to use them? Customization ideas? Advice on migrating a site from version 2 to 3?
I believe a table of contents would be a huge help in knowing what it covers. I don't think I will purchase personally (especially at the $40 non-discounted price), but I've wanted a good Bootstrap-specific book for a while. If you had a mailing list for the book I would subscribe, especially to watch for further editions or promos.
Indeed, there was "Designing Web Applications" by Nathan Barry for instance. See discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4909784 . Very similar discussion on pricing by the way...
How is it spam? The whole point of "Show HN" is showing off products people have made. What could you have possibly expected clicking on a Show HN with ebook in the title?
The problem here is that following the link I didn't see a product, I saw an advert for a product.
Show HN imo is a way to get feedback for your creation. In this case, in order to be able to provide feedback, I have to pay first $29—59.
Posting your commercial product in HN is an easy way to get tens of thousands of views. So either we should let anyone with a digital product advertise it here (think of any ebook, of any smartphone app, etc) and destroy essentially HN, or let no one.
That's absurd. Is he supposed to give it away to do a show HN? Every show HN is a link to a landing page. None of the SaaS apps are free either. You are showing people what you built. Perhaps asking for feedback on the website. You aren't giving it away for free to all of hn.
E.g. a typical search query can be "bootstrap ebook". Currently, you use "ebook" word only once in the smallest font. Your title has neither of this words.
At the very least, change your title to something like "Bootstrap in Practice — ebook and step-by-step examples"
That's true, but I'm not sure I'd really like to be found via that query.
Maybe I just have to do it and live with it :)
On the other hand, I recently searched for "bootstrap 3 grid" and "bootstrap landing" and was amazingly surprised to be on first and second place.
That really means a lot to me, because even with the ebook I wanted to share what I learned and be helpful to someone.
As I read all the comments complaining about the pricing I just can't wait for the recap post coming in a week or two saying how he made 5-10k today :-)
This isn't priced off of how much paper or bits cost people. If it saves a developer even an hour it is easily worth the price of admission.
