[freddywang]

To be fair, $200 is really not a lot of money. For all the contents, videos, interviews, samples, one can imagine how much effort being allocated for this. Being famous doesn't entitle someone to be able to charge expensively. Likewise, nothing is stopping anyone out there ("nobody" or not) to charge the price he or she wanted to. This is what we call internet, it's completely free market. No government or regulatory body is going to say "Hey Nathan! You are nobody, stop charging people a bloody $200 notes for a piece advice." Let's put some angles of perspective in, if he successfully sells 1000 copies at $200. He will make $200k revenue. Deduct that with the cost of his labor, his lost opportunity to work on his apps, marketing fee and the support time cost. He will probably pocket 30-40k pure profit. What if he has to follow what people say to price it lower at $20. Selling 1000 copies will barely cover his cost. And where are you going to find 1000 people who will believe this $20 crap going to give you top notch advice on delivering amazing web apps UX and design. Charge premium is a good start. Keep improving the content is a sure way to gain you the loyalty of customers.

Back to the odd marketing strategy. Why show it here? Why HN, really? Most will simply want something quick and simple to show the idea behind their hacks to the community. We are frequently being shown unfurnished prototype (indeed twitter bootstrap half the time). Anyone really serious about building well designed and engineered UX web applications will probably have a well funded startup with specialist UX designer onboard. Or someone must have been a long time practitioner of UX to be bothered about putting much focus on UX. It's not as simple as reading a book, listen to an interview, you become great in UX. It's only through years of experience, going through iteration after iteration of UX design tweaks, you will have a basic idea where to lead the good UX direction. A long the way, there are still huge chances to make UX mistakes here and there. Too simplified, or too complicated. Too plain, lack of creative input. Too much boring UX treating every users as dummy as they can. I am sure it will be hard for the community here to start bothering UX before getting their hacks done. And worst, the next hacks are waiting ....