A Quick Note on Anki Decks and the Tricky Issue of Money
As far as I’ve seen, Anki is the best memorization software out there, and I think widespread use of Anki would do a lot of good for the language community (not to mention education in general! You should see what kind of results Anki provides high school students I tutor!)
Anki is open source, and bringing money into the open source equation is a difficult topic. While Damien Elmes, the creator of Anki, has explicitly stated that selling Anki decks is allowed, it is still a thorny issue. Here’s what I’ve decided to do:
- Because of the demand, and because I’m currently relatively poor, I am indeed going to sell some Anki decks on this site. Making these decks isn’t something I need for my own language needs (I’ve released my personal decks for free over in the Languages section), but I do want to spread these ideas because they work, and getting a few bucks back for the time spent making the videos and designing user friendly decks seems to make sense.
- I’m going to keep the quality as high as possible and the prices extremely low.
- I’m going to provide demo versions, to make it absolutely clear what you’re getting, and to provide you with the card models I use so that you can make your own deck.
- I’m going to encourage making your own decks, since you learn more that way.
- I’m going to encourage people to donate to the Anki project and buy the iPhone app.
- If you find problems in a deck you’ve purchased, let me know and I’ll fix them and send new versions out.
Links:
To the Store
To the Blog