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Ask HN: Is it amoral to start charging for PDF of a previously free tutorial?

2 points by thewhitetulip ↗ HN
One year ago, I have written a FOSS tutorial on writing webapps on Go and published it via Leanpub using pay what you want model, the gitbooks version gets 1.5k readers each month ~50 unique per day and 1k downloads per month. only 4-5 users have paid $ via leanpub, I was thinking of removing the pdf version from gitbooks and making leanpub version as paid only. Is it amoral to start charging $ for PDF version? the source is FOSS on github and always will be OSS.

edit: https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/ is the link.

12 comments

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johnwheeler
of course not. you own some property or rights on it of some sort. what you do with it is entirely up to you. you could even change the license on future versions of the source, and it wouldn't be amoral.

you might face backlash under certain circumstances. you'd want to weigh that against the benefits of introducing restrictions.

thewhitetulip
I know that I have some rights over it, just that when I had published the book and had charged some $ and notified the reddit community of Go, I got severely downvoted because probably they saw it as click bait article driven to earn $ (despite the fact that you could just slide the $ thing on Leanpub to the left and download it for free)

Thank you for your advice. I also made a screencast for the book, I am divided as to where to publish it, youtube or udemy or somewhere else.

johnwheeler
that sounds like more of a function of reddit than amoral behavior.

ultimately you worked hard on something, and there's no shame in seeking recompense (pretty standard whether you're doing something commercial or open source)

thewhitetulip
Thank you! As a person who learned programming entirely from FOSS books and things, I felt immoral to charge for my tutorial/ebook.

Do you have any thoughts about the video series I made on the same ebook's content? Where does it make sense to publish? youtube or udemy or somewhere else?

johnwheeler
i dunno. i'm not much into go. if i was going to do systems programming, i'd probably look to rust since one of my big programming influences uses it (armin ronacher).

incidentally, i created a tutorial series on programming the amazon echo (alexatutorial.com). my tutorials are pretty dry, but i'm going to probably try and create more content and start charging for it. i always admired jon lindquist of egghead.io. he started self distributing and has built a little empire. same with geoffrey grosenbach of peepcode later acquired by pluralsight.

thewhitetulip
All the best for the alexa tutorial! I use Go for writing servers and not for systems programming, the lang was initially focused on systems programming, but it has now become a general purpose language, python - C bridge!
open-source-ux
No, it's not wrong to start charging.

You could make some of the chapters available for free, and offer the full version for a price. That will give potential buyers a preview of the content and help them to decide whether to purchase the full version. Good luck.

thewhitetulip
All the content is open source entirely on Github and readable, I have gone out of the way so that the content can be easily readable both online and offline, I also have made video tutorials on because I was requested on reddit, which I am divided where to publish, youtube or somewhere else, any thoughts on that?
open-source-ux
If you want to charge for your videos, post only a few example videos on YouTube (to act as a preview or taster for the course) with a link to the full video course on your site (or a third-party site).
thewhitetulip
This is a good idea, I was wondering about the ROI of Youtube vs others. Will Youtube ads earn me enough? I wasn't able to find out exactly how Youtube pays the video creators!