[marijn]

This aligns with my experience with https://eloquentjavascript.net, except that I put it online before publishing on paper, and my hunch is that it wouldn't have reached anywhere near the level of fame (and thus sales) it did if it hadn't been available online.

[cosmodisk]

Here's how I buy most technical books: I get a pirated copy,as those are available for 99% of the books.Skim it to see if it's any good at all and then I go on Amazon and buy it. With your book, I did the same, except that I didn't need to get a pirated copy- I went to the book's website. It's pointless for publishers not to release digital versions,as any book can and will digitised in a matter of hours and available for anyone to download. By the way,your book is excellent.Any plans to publish more books?

[diggan]

Agree. I feel there are two main audiences for technical books. Those who are interested in the subject and might have a career in/close to it in the future, and those who are interested in the subject and already work with it/similar things.

The first group won't be able to afford the book right now, but if you can still manage to give them the knowledge, they won't forget about it, and might come back to buy the book when they can afford it. I certainly did this for many books that been available for free, but as soon as I could, wanted to support the author. Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

The second group just want to be able to review something before they buy it, and the purchase is still not just about getting the content, but supporting the person creating the content.

So by having it available for free online, you can easier reach both these groups, as otherwise you mainly get the second one (and pirate copies with varying degree of quality all over the place)

[enitihas]

> Same goes for Open Source software with donation jars.

But no open source software is being sustainably developed on contributions form donation jars. There might be 1-2 exceptions, but most open source projects make pennies from donations.

[zozbot234]

The Blender open source project was started entirely from voluntary donations, and it gets very sizeable contributions to this day. The same applies to many other major projects. Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.

[ghaff]

>Even development of the Linux kernel itself and closely-related projects is largely funded via voluntary contributions to the Linux Foundation.

Development of the Linux kernel is largely funded by companies paying for developers to work on it (and by paying membership fees to the Linux Foundation to cover professional LF salaries like Linus').

[diggan]

I think the same goes for technical books. I don't have any source available for this but remember reading blog posts from authors that wrote; compared to the time spent on writing a book, the earnings doesn't justify writing the book for just the income. Rather, you do it for all the side-effects (sans income) of writing a book, exposure and the alike.

Not sure there are people who survive on only writing technical books, usually they have another job and do the book on the side of other things. At least as far as I can gather.

[ghaff]

I think that's correct about technical books for the most part. Certainly the case with me. Writing the books has been very valuable career-wise. But the money is trivial.

The difference with open source projects is that there are a lot of project leaders who in my experience get sucked into an ongoing full-time role for which they receive very little money. Such a role can lead to a good job of course. But my sense is that there are more people doing a full-timeish largely unpaid gig writing software/managing a project than in the case of technical books--which people are more likely to do as a one-off project that they may even do partly on work time.

[HumblyTossed]

I do this same thing. Emphasis is on skim. I never read a pirated book; if it isn't worth owning, it isn't worth my limited reading time.

Back when physical book stores existed, this is how I would buy books. I would go in and skim books and I would buy the ones I was interested in. It is nearly impossible to do this now as the remaining physical book stores can't carry all the books I'd like to skim and potentially buy.

[MaxBarraclough]

How about Google Books? Does that not obviate the need for outright piracy?

[throw0101a]

> wouldn't have reached anywhere near the level of fame (and thus sales)

Cory Doctorow in 2008:

> For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.

* https://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/

Now that he's more established and has a fan base it may be less applicable (just like Stephen King may not want to give away his stuff), but if anyone is starting out, getting readers is a challenge in the first place.

[aswanson]

Your book is excellent. Downloading and reading it made me feel incredibly guilty for not paying for it, so I bought a hard copy.

[notechback]

A tin, suggestion: I can't see anywhere on the page the year of finalisation/publication. Might be helpful to add as tech books are so quickly outdated :-)

[specialist]

Gorgeous book. You have great typographic esthetic. I like your writing voice. Thank you for sharing.

FWIW:

I skimmed to see, but did not find, if you specify the target JavaScript version and coding style.

I can't keep up with the rapid change in JS Universe. And I have absolutely no opinions. I just want someone to declare their preferred idiom and stick to it. House rules for objectness, for error handling, for concurrency, for modules, and so forth.

So a project would declare "ES2015, Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition, eslint w/ Twitter rules 2018-09-01".

Thanks for listening.

[keeganpoppen]

well, regardless of whether or not that is true (i genuinely hope it is-- for your sake and the world's) thank you very much for the choice that you did make. betting on yourself and your work in this way had the nice side effect of making the world a better place! :)

[billpollock]

You're probably right.