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Comment by drumttocs8 | Hacker News Reader

I love humblebundle and think it's awesome for games, programs, etc, but the model seems like a hard sell for programming books. How many people need machine learning books in a dozen or more programming languages?

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It's a way to target digital hoarders, similar to Valve's game sales. Most buyers will never read the books and they have essentially zero marginal distribution costs, so they make money either way.

Being a digital hoarder, myself, it's still quite tempting.

I tend to buy them and dump them in my library. I find it a really good way to see if it useful without investing £25-£50 on a print edition

edit: For hoarders remember they have free books each day on Packt. They put an annoying captcha to stop you automating the download though...

https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning

https://github.com/igbt6/Packt-Publishing-Free-Learning + anti-captcha.com

I hate Captchas so much that is the best thing I have seen in ages. Thank you so much for this

Wow. Anti Captcha seems like a company that should not exist. I don't want to go full /r/latestagecapitalism, but this seems like a typical economic activity that lures uneducated workers from rural areas to the city for a 'real office job', only to be trapped in a low-wage, low-opportunity job where the protocol is to do what you're told or get out. Their front page literally features a superhero shooting 'bad' workers with a laser.

Nobody. However, at this price even if only 3-5 of the books of useful to you then it's still a great deal. That subset will be different for everyone, so it makes sense to offer them all imo.

One useful book from the bundle will make for the price of all.

I find that I've stopped buying Humble Bundle games, but I'm much more inclined to buy books now. So they've basically figured out how to extract the most amount of cash out of me possible.

I am a bit skeptical about this list as there isn't a single book that I recognise, but I have read at least one decent PacktPub book, so I was willing to take the risk.

You can skim through the books and at the very worst they'll just tell you what you already know. The Machine Learning with Go seems interesting as it's off the typical Python/R/C++ path.

To bad IGN bought them. I won't use them anymore since it is now a broken system. A reviewer owns the store.

Does IGN review books now? I genuinely don't see any conflict here.

I am cautious about this whole arrangement, but that's more an issue with IGN than Humble Bundle: The store is still just selling games. IGN now has a motivation to slant things in favor of their sales, which makes them less trustworthy. But as long as Humble Bundle is still selling games, it's fine.

But I always worry with a big acquisition that they might change parts of the platform I like, and so that's my biggest concern.

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