When the members of his audience that do not find his e-books valuable leave, he will be left with an audience that does, and hopefully he’ll still make a living. I wish you the same success as a writer, Trent, however you ultimately end up doing that; I would certainly be one of your customers.

When the freely available information about athletic stats is published in card format, the resulting product can be very valuable indeed. I think there is a stigma attached to blogs that makes their monetization seem disreputable, but people have been publishing information for a living for a long time.

In terms of all the various blogs I read, I can’t say I’d ever feel betrayed if anyone decided to sell an ebook and make a profit. If the content was or seemed worth it I’d buy it, if not I wouldn’t. If someone is writing well enough to make money off of it, good for them. If it stinks they won’t make money, and that would be that.

I don’t feel betrayed if a business wants to charge higher prices, move their location, change something that I wouldn’t want changed. Perhaps I’d be annoyed but I don’t feel that business owners, corporations, bloggers, etc owe me anything and therefore I can’t imagine that I’d feel betrayed or wounded or whatever.

I think the fact that almost all commenters thought the same illustrates how careful you need to be with critical posts like this.

Now I’m intrigued. Which blog where you talking about? Come on, dish. Everyone loves a little PF blogosphere gossip. ;)

Thanks for clearing that up, Trent. Carry on. :)

I’m talking about another popular site that basically went from being a readable, enjoyable blog to a PDF-selling factory in a period of about a month.

I offered the ZTD ebook at the request of a number of very persistent readers, spent a couple weeks working on it, and a couple months working with the designer … I didn’t think people would mind my charging for the ebook, as I put a lot of extra work into it.

I also didn’t look at it as premium content … it was intended to be separate from my regular content … just as if I’d written a print book. In fact, ZTD is my attempt to branch off from my site and diversify (Trent had no way of knowing this as I didn’t talk about it on the site) … I plan to create a separate site for the ZTD ebook, with a web app and additional resources. I haven’t announced this yet, but it’s in my future plans.

Anyway, this is all backstory, to explain that I never intended to create premium content, and never will. I’m sorry if I caused anyone to feel betrayed.

Thanks for allowing me to clarify, everyone! Trent, I still love your site and will continue to be a faithful reader! :)

Some readers might feel betrayed (isnt that a little dramatic of a word?) but to those who arent, it comes off as snippy.

I have turned away from so many sites because they force you to purchase something for extra content. First it starts out with something small then when the money rolls in, they turn the site into a pay to view.

More concretely, if indeed we are talking about LB’s blog & e-book (why is everyone bothering to be so circumspect?), I think some of the readers may have found, as I did, that your ‘coverage’ of the situation was biased by characterizing it only as ‘premium content’ and not the optional repackaging of free material that it basically is.