Thanks! We've been trying to contact physical bookstores and online sellers til now. The forums, blogs and clubs may be a better way forward. Amazon does not operate in Australia and the most active marketplace is a minimal free service run by universities (textbooksexchange).
Lowering costs to compete with the near free alternative makes your company a poor competitor in comparison to them. This is because you have much higher costs and probably are not sufficiently different to justify it.
Options:
1. lower costs and essentially adopt the crowdsourced model
2. increase costs and quality and sell a premium product
Either way, the main thing is that you have identified that you do not want to tread water.
The advice I give in regards to where to look and how to go about improving your chances is exactly that. People who post vacancies on HN & GitHub are looking for hackers, not code-monkeys.
honestly this looks like a little advice on how to format your resumé / look for a job online. I saw nothing about acing the interview or how to write a really killer cover letter. I wrote a post about how to get a programming interview a few months back, I feel it provides more detail than your article
The title is 'How to find a job' not 'How to secure a job'.
Finding the opportunity is the hardest part and cover letters aren't as relevant as what you may think. I'm sure your post is great for interview advice, mine was aimed at helping people get those interviews in the first place.
My experience is that the cover letter was beneficial to getting an interview. In the cover letter I am able to demonstrate that I know about their company and that my skills/experience are a good fit for their position.
I know this was useful from my experience since the interviewers have mentioned that cover letter was very useful or they brought up details from it.
and cover letters aren't as relevant as what you may think
My experience tells me that cover letter relevancy is subjective. Some managers swear they need to read a good one, and others flip right to the resume.
scanning through the text, your name jumps out at me, which makes me ask myself what kind of HN consumer would call themselves that... to which the answer is, one with high average points karma
