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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

I admit that my gut reaction is that there's something fishy about selling notes about someone else's book, but thinking about it more, what's the harm?

There's nothing deceptive or sneaky about it. There's value in distilling information from a bloated book down to its useful ideas.

There are lots of books that are just existing ideas repackaged for a different audience. For example, Atomic Habits is basically a repackaged version of BJ Fogg's research papers. And people see value in that, so why isn't it okay to do that in a more 1:1 way?

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The short release period gives off "For a limited time only!" vibes, a scummy way to entice people to buy something now because they might not be able to later. It's also unclear that the notes even add value, they're described as "raw unfiltered chapter-by-chapter notes". Are they just random thoughts? Are they a better version of the chapters they line up with? Are they a companion to the book (the notes elaborating on the parts this author found to be too brief)? Are they responses to the contents? You don't know, until you spend more than the cost of the not-actually-bloated book that they cover.

> There's value in distilling information from a bloated book down to its useful ideas.

Yes, but it's not clear at all that this $25 limited-time-only set of notes actually does that, and they cost more than a book that is decidedly not bloated (it's 100 pages, 33 chapters, and each chapter is quite short).

Yeah, I agree. The "limited time only" seems manipulative and totally unnecessary.

I'm less convinced by the criticism about the notes potentially not being worth the money. That's true of basically all products.

In this case, if the buyer chooses to buy these notes based on the minimal information the author has shared, then the buyer should be ready to accept the possibility that the notes won't be what they expected.

He said it was unfiltered. If I was giving out some of my unfiltered thoughts, I don't think I'd want them floating around the Internet for anyone to read at any moment.

If you’re not comfortable with something “floating around on the internet” show could you possibly be comfortable SELLING that thing to the same people?

Of course. It means people genuinely interested in your content will have it, but people looking to score cheap Internet points on you won't. ("Did you know he once called chapter 5 of Bob Smith's book 'under-researched," and Bob Smith's grandfather is Puerto Rican, so he's literally saying that people of color are stupid")

If you look at the link, that's what he actually says.

     Sometimes these notes are not things I want to share with the whole world, but might be helpful for a few people.

     So what do I do? I release them, but only for a limited time. I also put on a price tag — not because I expect to make any money, but so that only those genuinely interested will read it.

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