Ask HN: Have you ever bought an eBook or mini course?

Let me just start by saying I tend to be cheap and I don't really read fiction anymore.

I don't buy eBooks. I prefer real books if it's a subject that requires 250 or more pages. Part of this might be that I'm tired of staring at screens at work all day or that I want a physical asset for my money. Under 250, I think I can find all the information I need through internet sources like articles, forums, blogs, etc. I once used a free eBook to learn C#.

I'm not sure what constitutes a mini course. I have done free coursera courses. I also paid about $30 for a practice AWS test set on Whizlabs.

Totally a fan of Udemy (at sale-price). I find their star points sytem a very reliable indicator of quality and have become a real fan of several of their featured instructors (among whom are Andrew Mead, Stephen Grider and Jonas Schmedtmann). Node.js stuff, React, Webpack, Mongo etc. More advanced stuff is a little sparse, to be fair.

I bought a few non fiction ebooks and Udemy courses and always found value in them. Never paid more than 30£ for one, tho.

Especially satisfied with Udemy : I heard a lot of "everything is on youtube, google the rest" but having a structured course really helped me get into programming. For 10$ (wait for the weekly "sales", that's the real price) you have access to a great educator who can afford to invest more time into his lessons than a youtuber or in a medium post.

Unfortunately I can't seems to find valuable ebooks or courses for more advanced topics...

A few years ago it seemed like every tech book I was interested in was in Kindle Unlimited. One price, hard to beat. The first year I was happy. Year two seemed like almost nothing was on kindle unlimited. This third year, literally NOTHING I want is on kindle unlimited. Needless to say, no more good money after bad.

I have paid for like 3 classes, each under $20. Two I was happy with one I felt a bit cheated.

I do buy ebooks for my kindle. Mostly fiction books bcz reading a technical book is difficult in kindle. Though it sucks that I can only read those ebooks in Amazon kindle platforms but kindle is good for bedtime reading. Also, I have purchased some courses from Udemy almost 12 but I never got to finish any of them. Some of the courses are great but others are boring hell.

I bought several mini courses on Udemy. The Udemy SECRET: wishlist a course and wait for Udemy to have a sale. I got the Complete iOS and Swift Bootcamp [1] for $11.99.

[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/ios-13-app-development-bootcamp...

The trade-off is simple to me (both as a reader and more recently as a provider): it is time vs money. How long would you need to collect, organize and present the material you are buying? Any well conceived eBook or mini course you need is so cheap compared to its cost, in that sense.

I bought a few web development ebooks from Smashing Magazine in the past, as well as a game design book about Wario Land 4.

That's about it though.

Web design. I think the screenshots and examples in the ebook (PDF) were of higher quality than in a print version.

I'm generally turn off by the idea of paying for content but I know sometimes people do. kinda like clicking on adwords.