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Comment by gommm | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to chime in that I love your website and love binge reading articles from it every few months.. Thanks for all the work you've done on it!

I never actually read the book mostly because I tend to read ebooks and it doesn't seem to be available as one? Kind of curious about the exclusive content though.

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Thanks! Yes, unfortunately the physical book was never released as an e-book. It was released around the time e-books were first becoming viable, and a few months after it was published the publisher proposed we release it as an e-book. But the new contract was very far-reaching, and would have granted the publisher half of all proceeds of any "electronic distribution" of the book's content. When I asked them to revise the contract to exempt the preexisting website from this condition, they lost interest.

Sigh, that publisher really seemed tone deaf between the cover and this... Is there still exclusive content in the book that never was published on the site?

Yes, though it is not a huge quantity of content. If memory serves, there were four writings made exclusively for the book.

The publisher really was a pain in the ass. In addition to what I already mentioned, they insisted that I be listed as the book's author, despite the fact that I only wrote about half of the content. I argued for the author credit to be "The [name of the website] Editors", but they ignored my input, claiming that books sell better when a single person is named as the primary author. In so doing they drove a wedge between me and my fellow authors.

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