Epistemic status: thinking aloud, not got any plans, definitely not making any commitments.
I’m thinking about building a pipeline to produce a lot of LessWrong books based around authors. The idea being that a bunch of authors would have their best essays collated in a single book, with a coherent aesthetic and ML art and attractive typography.
This stands in contrast to making books around sequences, and I do really like sequences, but when I think about most authors whose work I love from the past 5 years there’s a lot of standalone essays, and they don’t tie together half as neatly as Eliezer’s original sequences (and were not supposed to). For instance, Eliezer himself has written a lot of standalone dialogues in recent years that could be collated into a book, but that don’t make sense as a ‘sequence’ on a single theme.
Well, the actual reason I’m writing this is because I sometimes feel a tension between my own taste (e.g. who I’d like to make books for) and not wanting to impose my opinions too dictatorially on the website. Like, I do want to show the best of what LessWrong has, but I think sometimes I’d want to have more discretion — for instance maybe I’d want to release a series of three books on similar themes, and but I don’t know a good way to justify my arbitrary choice there of which books to make.
The review was a process of making a book that maximally took my judgment about content out of the decision, that well-represented the best of LW. I also don’t know that I really want to use a voting process to determine which essays go into the books, I think the essays in the book are more personal and represent the author, and also a book coheres better together if it’s put together with a single vision, and I’d rather that be a collaboration between me and the author (to the extent they wish to be involved).
One way would be to setup a general pipeline that can be used by everyone and give extra attention to those authors for whom you want to make books to do all the necessary work for them.
[What follows is a definitely impractical recommendation, which can hopefully be approximated by more practical actions. For example, you could have voting take place before the bookmaking, so that people only vote on teams, and each team can take more time & effort into making the books because of the guaranteed publishing]
If you want the community to be involved, and you also want lots of books with single visions, then you can have the community vote on a collection of books rather than essays. Top n books get published by Lightcone/LessWrong, and maybe before voting Lightcone/LessWrong provides an impact market like mechanism by which people can buy/sell stocks on which book teams will get in the top n in order to pay people to actually work on the books.
Alternatively, you could brand the books you want under the name Ben Pace rather than LessWrong, like the team does when making comments on LessWrong.
I could, but I’d really like to build up the LW library, not the Ben Pace library. LW’s library sounds like a much cooler library that people would be really keen to read. It’s just hard to figure out how to do that right.
I am curious about whether the goal of making lesswrong books is driven by a general interest in making a book “It would be fun to get together a book, I would love to have a copy of my favourite ideas in physical form”, or is a way of trying to introduce people to your favourite essays? Because, I worry that if its the latter a book might not be an efficient approach. There are many, many random self-published books available, most of which probably sell 10′s of copies (if that). So, if you made the book as a way of reaching people, you would then still need to reach people (somehow) to tell them about the book, and the inertia against buying a book of unknown quality is probably higher than that against “read this random article someone has linked me, hey look it says its only a 15 min read”.
Many thousands of people have bought the last two sets of books we produced. They were to a much higher quality standard than 99% of self-published books available.
Yes, part of my motive is for lots of people who haven’t read these posts to have them in a beautifully designed physical format and finally get around to reading them. I would guess that there are less than 100 people who have read every essay in each of the books (before the books were published), so I think most people who bought them got new content.
I have no-doubt at all that the books are of a much higher quality than most self-published material. And the thousands of sales of the last two books is impressive! My point was that someone who had never heard of lesswrong before was unlikely to purchase a book “cold”—which is what I had read as your intention. But from the reply your goal is instead to connect people already in the know with more good stuff faster, which a book probably achieves well. (In addition to the “books are just really nice things” angle.)
Epistemic status: thinking aloud, not got any plans, definitely not making any commitments.
I’m thinking about building a pipeline to produce a lot of LessWrong books based around authors. The idea being that a bunch of authors would have their best essays collated in a single book, with a coherent aesthetic and ML art and attractive typography.
This stands in contrast to making books around sequences, and I do really like sequences, but when I think about most authors whose work I love from the past 5 years there’s a lot of standalone essays, and they don’t tie together half as neatly as Eliezer’s original sequences (and were not supposed to). For instance, Eliezer himself has written a lot of standalone dialogues in recent years that could be collated into a book, but that don’t make sense as a ‘sequence’ on a single theme.
Well, the actual reason I’m writing this is because I sometimes feel a tension between my own taste (e.g. who I’d like to make books for) and not wanting to impose my opinions too dictatorially on the website. Like, I do want to show the best of what LessWrong has, but I think sometimes I’d want to have more discretion — for instance maybe I’d want to release a series of three books on similar themes, and but I don’t know a good way to justify my arbitrary choice there of which books to make.
The review was a process of making a book that maximally took my judgment about content out of the decision, that well-represented the best of LW. I also don’t know that I really want to use a voting process to determine which essays go into the books, I think the essays in the book are more personal and represent the author, and also a book coheres better together if it’s put together with a single vision, and I’d rather that be a collaboration between me and the author (to the extent they wish to be involved).
Thoughts on ways for me to move forward on this?
Why not do both? Are there any relevant hard limits on how many books you can publish?
Publish normal LW books, and publish your own curation of books?
One way would be to setup a general pipeline that can be used by everyone and give extra attention to those authors for whom you want to make books to do all the necessary work for them.
[What follows is a definitely impractical recommendation, which can hopefully be approximated by more practical actions. For example, you could have voting take place before the bookmaking, so that people only vote on teams, and each team can take more time & effort into making the books because of the guaranteed publishing]
If you want the community to be involved, and you also want lots of books with single visions, then you can have the community vote on a collection of books rather than essays. Top n books get published by Lightcone/LessWrong, and maybe before voting Lightcone/LessWrong provides an impact market like mechanism by which people can buy/sell stocks on which book teams will get in the top n in order to pay people to actually work on the books.
Alternatively, you could brand the books you want under the name Ben Pace rather than LessWrong, like the team does when making comments on LessWrong.
I could, but I’d really like to build up the LW library, not the Ben Pace library. LW’s library sounds like a much cooler library that people would be really keen to read. It’s just hard to figure out how to do that right.
I am curious about whether the goal of making lesswrong books is driven by a general interest in making a book “It would be fun to get together a book, I would love to have a copy of my favourite ideas in physical form”, or is a way of trying to introduce people to your favourite essays? Because, I worry that if its the latter a book might not be an efficient approach. There are many, many random self-published books available, most of which probably sell 10′s of copies (if that). So, if you made the book as a way of reaching people, you would then still need to reach people (somehow) to tell them about the book, and the inertia against buying a book of unknown quality is probably higher than that against “read this random article someone has linked me, hey look it says its only a 15 min read”.
Many thousands of people have bought the last two sets of books we produced. They were to a much higher quality standard than 99% of self-published books available.
Yes, part of my motive is for lots of people who haven’t read these posts to have them in a beautifully designed physical format and finally get around to reading them. I would guess that there are less than 100 people who have read every essay in each of the books (before the books were published), so I think most people who bought them got new content.
I have no-doubt at all that the books are of a much higher quality than most self-published material. And the thousands of sales of the last two books is impressive! My point was that someone who had never heard of lesswrong before was unlikely to purchase a book “cold”—which is what I had read as your intention. But from the reply your goal is instead to connect people already in the know with more good stuff faster, which a book probably achieves well. (In addition to the “books are just really nice things” angle.)
You don’t need to have brought a book to read it. It can also be gifted.