Sure, Eric is selling his blog content on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned), but the key difference is that Eric asked us to do it, and he's getting money :).

And of course someone could get around the need to pay $29.99 by writing a script, but if you value your time at all it wouldn't be worth it.

We think it's a good deal for Eric (he makes money from something he has given away for free) and a good deal for the reader (it's much more pleasant to read a PDF than to click through posts in a web browser, and even more pleasant to read it on a Kindle.).