I’d had a leanpub version of my geometric algebra book available for a while and have now added editions of all my older class notes compilations that I have on amazon.  My complete leanpub selection now looks like:

I believe that leanpub essentially provides a pdf to the purchaser (I haven’t tried buying a copy to verify), and I give the pdfs away for free, so you (and I) might ask why somebody would opt to buy such a copy?

There are a few possible reasons that I can think of:

  1. Many of the leanpub purchases have been above the minimum price, so at least some of the purchasers are compensating proportionally to their personal valuation of the material, and aren’t strictly trying to buy for the minimum price.
  2. A leanpub purchase is subscription like.  Anybody that purchases a copy will automatically receive any updates made without having to check for a new version manually.
  3. There is a per-book forum available for each of the books (if the author enables it.)  I didn’t realize that feature was available, and have now enabled the forum for my geometric algebra book.  I’ve also enabled a forum for each of the class notes compilations as I configured them.
  4. The purchaser did not know that I also offer the pdf for free, and found the title in leanpub search, not through my website where I make that obvious.

I’ve been putting all my leanpub proceeds into my kiva loan portfolio, so if somebody had the bad luck to buy a copy of my book because of (4) above, I don’t feel very guilty about it.