Today we're announcing a partnership with Castify to bring you Less Wrong content in audio form. Castify gets blog content read by professional readers and delivers it to their subscribers as a podcast so that you can listen to Less Wrong on the go. The founders of Castify are big fans of Less Wrong so they're rolling out their beta with some of our content.
To see how many people will use this, we're having the entire Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions core sequence read and recorded. We thought listening to it would be a great way for new readers to get caught up and for others to check out the quality of Castify's work. We will be adding more Less Wrong content based on community feedback, so let us know which content you'd like to see more of in the comments.
Another comment prompted by the LW channel page...
If one is free to keep the files forever after downloading them once, why not call this "buy" instead of "subscribe" and give people the right to re-download the files at any time? I doubt you'd lose much money from that, and I expect that it might actually net you more sales. A big reason why I'm happy to use various digital stores is the knowledge that I can always re-download the files at any time if I have a hard drive crash, and don't need to worry about one more thing that I should keep backed up. Or I can even go on a spending spree and buy a big bunch of things at once, knowing that I'll only download a couple of them now and can grab the rest whenever I have the time for them. If there was a time limit on when I needed to download my purchases, I'd be a lot less likely to do that, since I might forget about it.
If you call this "subscribe" and give people a limited amount of time to download the stuff, you're making their mental frame of reference to be to other subscription services, which I expect is going to evaluate unfavorably. Five dollars to subscribe invites an automatic comparison to Spotify, which I currently pay five euros a month to subscribe to, and which gives me access to a lot more content. (Yes, your five dollars is for six months not one, but that's a System 2 distinction and people tend to use System 1 for these kinds of decisions.) In contrast, if you're calling it "buy", my mind goes "wow, 29 articles by a professional voice actor for only $4.99? That's a killer bargain!"
That's pretty convincing. For some reason I had that limited access idea locked in my head. It just stuck for some reason. We will definitely have a chat about changing that very soon.
(Some background: We were going to launch initially with monthly subscriptions, where you get new content every month. In the end, we decided to start with a core sequence and gauge the feedback from everyone. So we had a subscription model "locked in" from early days.)
Update: This limitation and wording has now been removed. However, in our terms of service, we giv... (read more)