[righyeah]

You've also nailed it with your first sentence.

The answer to your question of whether the book is necessary is in the blog post (I think marketers call this a "sales letter"?). It is in bold. It describes a person who wants to pay money in order to improve their life.

Now, as to anyone claiming to have paid money and had their life improve, we may know that paying money was not necessary and not at cause for any change in their life. That was something they did on their own. But the blogger is OK with that. In fact he sees it as a key to his enterprise. He says the product (web app, etc.) does not necessarily matter. You simply need to find people who want to pay money to improve their life.

The ethical question is do you care if 99% of them may fail to improve it by simply paying money? That's not your fault of course. But it makes you wonder what exactly you are selling. Maybe you are just a sink for a known type of source --> The type of person looking to spend money on information to "improve their life", despite the availability of the same information without cost; and despite the fact that the key to improving their life may have nothing to do with impulsively buying an ebook.

Not everyone will answer that ethical question the same way. If they did we would not be having a discussion about this.

Any Rails developer can skip the ebook and just raise their rates for new clients. What's the worst that can happen? The only way to know what the market will bear is to test it. Alternatively they could stop coding and sell ebooks to other developers with the knowledge that "some people are looking to spend money to improve their lives and it really doesn't matter what that something is". It doesn't have to be a application you spent large blocks of time developing. An ebook on how easy it is to make money (by finding people ready to spend money to improve their lives) that you wrote in a single day may be just fine.