But, who cares in 5 years whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017? For people who want to just read the best that LessWrong has to offer, the year isn’t that crucial. Indeed, if someone is considering buying one of our review books in 5 years, I really don’t want them to think that they first have to buy the 2018 book before the 2019 book, or that the year is somehow super significant, or that the content was driven by some current events happening in that year. I want them to look at the title, the content, and the structure, and see which one they like best, judging the content and not the date.
Our original title was “The LessWrong Review 2018” but then everyone we ran the name by thought that the book was released in 2018, and that was really confusing (If you call it the 2019 review, everything gets even worse, so that’s also not an option). They also thought that the fact that the year is so pronounced means that the content is probably very time-sensitive, and so given that it is now two years later, the content is probably out of date. They also thought that they had to understand what the “LessWrong Review” is before they feel comfortable buying the book, because it sounds kinda technical and weird.
And then when we asked them about buying the 2019 Review book, they felt like they had to buy the 2018 book first, because there was a really strong implied order, and they weren’t sure whether the books were building on each other.
But when we just asked people what they felt if we said that we had put a lot of efforts curating the best essays on LessWrong. And this is one of those collections. Then they got the point of the book. And then we could mention in the secondary text that the way we curated this collection is via a whole cool fancy review process that they can learn more about if they want, but they don’t have to, and all that they need to know is that these are some curated essays on LessWrong, organized by a number of themes, that can stand alone without needing to have read anything else. And I think that overall just gave people a much better model of the book than if we had emphasized the year super much.
Thanks for the reasoning here. I also don’t want to detract people from purchasing these books, I imagine if people really wanted they could write the dates on them manually.
That said—
To better explain my intuitions here:
In 5 years from now, I care about whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017 if I am trying to find a particular one in a book, or recommend one to another person. Ordering is really simple to remember compared to other kinds of naming one could use. When going between different books the date is particularly relevant because names and concepts will change over time. I’d hope that 10 years from now much of the 2018 content will look antiquated and old.
If you’re just aiming for “timeless and good quality posts” (this sounds like the value proposition for the readers you are referring to), then I don’t understand the need to only choose ones from 2018. Many good ones came out before 2018 that I imagine would be interesting to readers. That said, if you plan on releasing them on yearly intervals later I’d imagine some restriction might be necessary. Or, it could be that whenever a few topics seem to have come full circle or be in a good place for a book, you publish a book focused on those topics.
I agree that “LessWrong Review 2018” sounds strange, but there are other phrases that could have with 2018 in them. Many Academic periodicals (including things like Philosophy, which are at least as timeless as LessWrong content) have yearly collections. With those I don’t assume I need to read all of the old ones before reading the current year, that would take quite a while (it becomes more obvious after a few are out). I imagine the name could be something like, “LessWrong Highlighted Content: 2018″ or “The Best of LessWrong: 2018”.
It’s very possible that there’s kind of a “free pass” for the first 1-3 years, if this is a repeating thing, and then you could start adding the year. It’s not that big a deal if there are just 2-3 of these, but I imagine it will get to be annoying if there are 5+ (and by that time it will be more obvious if it’s an issue or not)
That said, if you plan on releasing them on yearly intervals later I’d imagine some restriction might be necessary. Or, it could be that whenever a few topics seem to have come full circle or be in a good place for a book, you publish a book focused on those topics.
Yeah, it’s mostly that I don’t know of a great alternative mechanism for the Review. The Schelling nature of doing a review thing at the end of the year seems pretty strong, and having a year as the natural unit of review also seems really intuitive and nice.
I do think there is a good chance we are going to release some other books that are not part of the review cycle that are more centered around specific topics. But I really don’t know yet how to fit them into all of this, and whether they are part of the same series, or their branding, or whether they are going to happen at all.
It’s very possible that there’s kind of a “free pass” for the first 1-3 years, if this is a repeating thing, and then you could start adding the year. It’s not that big a deal if there are just 2-3 of these, but I imagine it will get to be annoying if there are 5+ (and by that time it will be more obvious if it’s an issue or not)
Yeah, I actually agree with this. Amazon has a field for “Series Title” that I want to fill in, of which this would be Vol. 1. Some obvious candidates for the series title are “Best of LessWrong” and “The LessWrong Review”. I don’t think there is much benefit to emphasizing a series title in the first entry of a series very much, but I think it makes sense to emphasize them more in future years, where they start actually doing anything. I still wouldn’t want to put the year into the title, because if we are usually going to release these 1.5-2 years afterward, people are inevitably going to get really confused about when the books were released.
First of all, I think the books are beautiful. This seems like a great project to me and I’m really glad you all put it together.
I didn’t think of this on my own but now that Ozzie raised it, I do think it’s misleading not to mention (or at least suggest) that this is selecting the best posts from a particular year in a salient way on the cover.[1] This isn’t really because anybody cares whether it’s from 2018 or 2019. It’s because I think most reasonable readers looking at a curated collection of LessWrong posts titled “Epistemology,” “Agency,” or “Alignment” would assume that this was a collection of the best ever LW[2] posts on that topic as of ~date of publication. That’s a higher bar than ‘one of the best posts on epistemology on LW in 2018’ and many (most?) readers might prefer it.
Counterargument: maybe all of your customers already know about the project and are sufficiently informed about what this is that putting it on the cover isn’t necessary.
Apologies if the ship’s already sailed on this and feedback is counterproductive at this point. Overall, I don’t think this is a huge deal.
[1] Though not intentionally so.
[2] Maybe people think of LW 2.0 as a sufficient break that they wouldn’t be surprised if it was restricted to that.
most reasonable readers looking at a curated collection of LessWrong posts titled “Epistemology,” “Agency,” or “Alignment” would assume that this was a collection of the best ever LW[2] posts on that topic as of ~date of publication
One of the most frustrating things about writing physical books is the long time delays. It has been 17 months since I mentioned my upcoming book here, and now, 8.5 months after we submitted the full book for review, & over 4 months after 7 out of 7 referees said “great book, as it is”, I can finally announce that The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, coauthored with Kevin Simler, will officially be published January 1, 2018. Sigh.
The post was in Feb 2017, which meant he had to wait another 10 months for it to come out. Overall that means the book came out at least 2 years and 3 months after he began writing it, and 1 year and 6 months after it was finalized and finished. I don’t know if Oxford University Press is always this slow. But I don’t think that if someone read the book then heard about it, they’d feel especially upset to find out it didn’t represent Robin’s ideas on date-of-publishing but in fact was 1.5 years out-of-date.
The essays in the book were the best new essays on LW at the time we decided to make it into a book, which is 2 years ago, so we’re a little slower than OUP (in large part because we have a self-imposed 1-year break in the middle_), and I think next time I’ll just do the whole thing quicker (now that we’ve learned how to use all the software, how to interface with the printers, how to interface with Amazon, how to interface with editors, etc).
I understand Howie to be saying that he would expect posts from e.g. 2014 to be included, I.e. the emphasis is on older essays, not newer essays. It does seem really hard to have the best essays since the date of publication included, though I agree that we will reduce the gap of publication to essay collection in the future.
I tried actually pretty hard to fit it on the front cover somewhere, but it was actually quite hard design wise (the way I phrased the design challenge is that if you have 5 books, each book can only kind of be 1/5th as complex as a normal book cover). It does say it in the first sentence on the back, and I think we tried to mention 2018 almost everywhere in the first sentence we promote the book, and also “new essays from LessWrong” a lot, so that people don’t get confused about it having really old content.
My current guess is that the right place to emphasize the 2018 year is in all the marketing materials and communication, as well as the book cover, and not super prominently on the front cover itself.
Small correction: We didn’t mention it as prominently as I would have liked on Twitter. We mentioned it like two levels deep, which isn‘t super great. Will be more careful with that in the future. Though Twitter just links to the /books page, which mentions it as the first sentence.
What about on the spine? I agree it doesn’t fit the cover, but right now the spine, from top to bottom, is [art], [title], [art], “LessWrong”, [logo]. I wonder if it might make sense to either add a bit of whitespace at the top for the year, or at the bottom after the publisher info, such that it would look like “LessWrong ✵ 2019″. This way it’s subtle/understated, you don’t have to change the title, but if, in 5-10 years’ time, some of us have 2018-2027 on our bookshelves, and we want to find something we remember from 2023, we don’t have to pull out each one to look at the back cover (or, gasp, be organized).
Also, what were the considerations regarding size? I know the size you picked was because you found it’s what people are most likely to read, but I’m thinking that “book you might take to read in a coffeeshop or on a train” and “book you keep on your bookshelf at home” (which ozziegooen seemed to be making reference to above) are different aesthetics—that is, I might assume the latter to be much heftier than the former, more like an academic journal than a pocketbook. Actually, I wonder then if it might make sense if it might make sense to abandon ship with the current book set—to do the yearly wrap-ups as journal-style publications (that is, single-volume instead of five, larger, simpler cover—you may not have seen it, but I’m thinking American Affairs-style), and then publish a set of best-all-time books (like Howie Lempel mentioned) in this nice size.
Yeah, we did originally plan to put something like that in the spine, but the spine was actually the hardest part of the whole design to get right. We went through at least 10 iterations of it, with literally all but the latest one looking completely hideous (according to me). It’s possible we could have fit an additional thing on there, but when we finally got something that looked good, I just locked it in and moved on, since we were like a week away from our final print deadline.
Other timeless but year-of-publication restricted anthologies like “Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror” and “Year’s Best Science Writing” have either “Nth annual” or [year the entries were published] prominently on the title. This is an established convention. The problems of “what the hell book did I read that in?”, “Finding the books on Amazon” and “Have I read this already? Who’s to say.” seem much bigger to me than a fraction of the audience that hasn’t picked up that convention AND will be blocked from reading by it.
I think a “Nth annual” is a good thing. It will be on the Amazon page (still not fully sure what the series title will be, by default something like “Best of LessWrong”), and of course we will have a section on the site that will organize the books in order, after we released more than one. But having each individual book be prominently stand-alone seems pretty important to me, and also having a prominent series title for the first book, or book set, in a series seems also kind of unnecessary to me. If we’ve done three of those, then maybe there is a benefit that people get from knowing what series it is part of, but for the first one, the info seems really unnecessary for the vast majority of readers.
I also don’t want to commit us too hard to doing a book every year. Like, I know we want to do a book for this year’s (2019) review, but I really don’t know yet whether we will do one for next year, and also the book for this year’s review might look so totally different that putting them in a series doesn’t really make sense. Starting a whole series title and then abandoning it seems pretty bad to me, if you don’t even know whether it will have more than two entries.
But, who cares in 5 years whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017? For people who want to just read the best that LessWrong has to offer, the year isn’t that crucial. Indeed, if someone is considering buying one of our review books in 5 years, I really don’t want them to think that they first have to buy the 2018 book before the 2019 book, or that the year is somehow super significant, or that the content was driven by some current events happening in that year. I want them to look at the title, the content, and the structure, and see which one they like best, judging the content and not the date.
Our original title was “The LessWrong Review 2018” but then everyone we ran the name by thought that the book was released in 2018, and that was really confusing (If you call it the 2019 review, everything gets even worse, so that’s also not an option). They also thought that the fact that the year is so pronounced means that the content is probably very time-sensitive, and so given that it is now two years later, the content is probably out of date. They also thought that they had to understand what the “LessWrong Review” is before they feel comfortable buying the book, because it sounds kinda technical and weird.
And then when we asked them about buying the 2019 Review book, they felt like they had to buy the 2018 book first, because there was a really strong implied order, and they weren’t sure whether the books were building on each other.
But when we just asked people what they felt if we said that we had put a lot of efforts curating the best essays on LessWrong. And this is one of those collections. Then they got the point of the book. And then we could mention in the secondary text that the way we curated this collection is via a whole cool fancy review process that they can learn more about if they want, but they don’t have to, and all that they need to know is that these are some curated essays on LessWrong, organized by a number of themes, that can stand alone without needing to have read anything else. And I think that overall just gave people a much better model of the book than if we had emphasized the year super much.
Thanks for the reasoning here. I also don’t want to detract people from purchasing these books, I imagine if people really wanted they could write the dates on them manually.
That said—
To better explain my intuitions here:
In 5 years from now, I care about whether the essays came out in 2018 or in 2017 if I am trying to find a particular one in a book, or recommend one to another person. Ordering is really simple to remember compared to other kinds of naming one could use. When going between different books the date is particularly relevant because names and concepts will change over time. I’d hope that 10 years from now much of the 2018 content will look antiquated and old.
If you’re just aiming for “timeless and good quality posts” (this sounds like the value proposition for the readers you are referring to), then I don’t understand the need to only choose ones from 2018. Many good ones came out before 2018 that I imagine would be interesting to readers. That said, if you plan on releasing them on yearly intervals later I’d imagine some restriction might be necessary. Or, it could be that whenever a few topics seem to have come full circle or be in a good place for a book, you publish a book focused on those topics.
I agree that “LessWrong Review 2018” sounds strange, but there are other phrases that could have with 2018 in them. Many Academic periodicals (including things like Philosophy, which are at least as timeless as LessWrong content) have yearly collections. With those I don’t assume I need to read all of the old ones before reading the current year, that would take quite a while (it becomes more obvious after a few are out). I imagine the name could be something like, “LessWrong Highlighted Content: 2018″ or “The Best of LessWrong: 2018”.
It’s very possible that there’s kind of a “free pass” for the first 1-3 years, if this is a repeating thing, and then you could start adding the year. It’s not that big a deal if there are just 2-3 of these, but I imagine it will get to be annoying if there are 5+ (and by that time it will be more obvious if it’s an issue or not)
Yeah, it’s mostly that I don’t know of a great alternative mechanism for the Review. The Schelling nature of doing a review thing at the end of the year seems pretty strong, and having a year as the natural unit of review also seems really intuitive and nice.
I do think there is a good chance we are going to release some other books that are not part of the review cycle that are more centered around specific topics. But I really don’t know yet how to fit them into all of this, and whether they are part of the same series, or their branding, or whether they are going to happen at all.
Yeah, I actually agree with this. Amazon has a field for “Series Title” that I want to fill in, of which this would be Vol. 1. Some obvious candidates for the series title are “Best of LessWrong” and “The LessWrong Review”. I don’t think there is much benefit to emphasizing a series title in the first entry of a series very much, but I think it makes sense to emphasize them more in future years, where they start actually doing anything. I still wouldn’t want to put the year into the title, because if we are usually going to release these 1.5-2 years afterward, people are inevitably going to get really confused about when the books were released.
First of all, I think the books are beautiful. This seems like a great project to me and I’m really glad you all put it together.
I didn’t think of this on my own but now that Ozzie raised it, I do think it’s misleading not to mention (or at least suggest) that this is selecting the best posts from a particular year in a salient way on the cover.[1] This isn’t really because anybody cares whether it’s from 2018 or 2019. It’s because I think most reasonable readers looking at a curated collection of LessWrong posts titled “Epistemology,” “Agency,” or “Alignment” would assume that this was a collection of the best ever LW[2] posts on that topic as of ~date of publication. That’s a higher bar than ‘one of the best posts on epistemology on LW in 2018’ and many (most?) readers might prefer it.
Counterargument: maybe all of your customers already know about the project and are sufficiently informed about what this is that putting it on the cover isn’t necessary.
Apologies if the ship’s already sailed on this and feedback is counterproductive at this point. Overall, I don’t think this is a huge deal.
[1] Though not intentionally so.
[2] Maybe people think of LW 2.0 as a sufficient break that they wouldn’t be surprised if it was restricted to that.
Consider this quote from Robin Hanson:
The post was in Feb 2017, which meant he had to wait another 10 months for it to come out. Overall that means the book came out at least 2 years and 3 months after he began writing it, and 1 year and 6 months after it was finalized and finished. I don’t know if Oxford University Press is always this slow. But I don’t think that if someone read the book then heard about it, they’d feel especially upset to find out it didn’t represent Robin’s ideas on date-of-publishing but in fact was 1.5 years out-of-date.
The essays in the book were the best new essays on LW at the time we decided to make it into a book, which is 2 years ago, so we’re a little slower than OUP (in large part because we have a self-imposed 1-year break in the middle_), and I think next time I’ll just do the whole thing quicker (now that we’ve learned how to use all the software, how to interface with the printers, how to interface with Amazon, how to interface with editors, etc).
I understand Howie to be saying that he would expect posts from e.g. 2014 to be included, I.e. the emphasis is on older essays, not newer essays. It does seem really hard to have the best essays since the date of publication included, though I agree that we will reduce the gap of publication to essay collection in the future.
I tried actually pretty hard to fit it on the front cover somewhere, but it was actually quite hard design wise (the way I phrased the design challenge is that if you have 5 books, each book can only kind of be 1/5th as complex as a normal book cover). It does say it in the first sentence on the back, and I think we tried to mention 2018 almost everywhere in the first sentence we promote the book, and also “new essays from LessWrong” a lot, so that people don’t get confused about it having really old content.
My current guess is that the right place to emphasize the 2018 year is in all the marketing materials and communication, as well as the book cover, and not super prominently on the front cover itself.
Small correction: We didn’t mention it as prominently as I would have liked on Twitter. We mentioned it like two levels deep, which isn‘t super great. Will be more careful with that in the future. Though Twitter just links to the /books page, which mentions it as the first sentence.
What about on the spine? I agree it doesn’t fit the cover, but right now the spine, from top to bottom, is [art], [title], [art], “LessWrong”, [logo]. I wonder if it might make sense to either add a bit of whitespace at the top for the year, or at the bottom after the publisher info, such that it would look like “LessWrong ✵ 2019″. This way it’s subtle/understated, you don’t have to change the title, but if, in 5-10 years’ time, some of us have 2018-2027 on our bookshelves, and we want to find something we remember from 2023, we don’t have to pull out each one to look at the back cover (or, gasp, be organized).
Also, what were the considerations regarding size? I know the size you picked was because you found it’s what people are most likely to read, but I’m thinking that “book you might take to read in a coffeeshop or on a train” and “book you keep on your bookshelf at home” (which ozziegooen seemed to be making reference to above) are different aesthetics—that is, I might assume the latter to be much heftier than the former, more like an academic journal than a pocketbook. Actually, I wonder then if it might make sense if it might make sense to abandon ship with the current book set—to do the yearly wrap-ups as journal-style publications (that is, single-volume instead of five, larger, simpler cover—you may not have seen it, but I’m thinking American Affairs-style), and then publish a set of best-all-time books (like Howie Lempel mentioned) in this nice size.
Yeah, we did originally plan to put something like that in the spine, but the spine was actually the hardest part of the whole design to get right. We went through at least 10 iterations of it, with literally all but the latest one looking completely hideous (according to me). It’s possible we could have fit an additional thing on there, but when we finally got something that looked good, I just locked it in and moved on, since we were like a week away from our final print deadline.
Other timeless but year-of-publication restricted anthologies like “Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror” and “Year’s Best Science Writing” have either “Nth annual” or [year the entries were published] prominently on the title. This is an established convention. The problems of “what the hell book did I read that in?”, “Finding the books on Amazon” and “Have I read this already? Who’s to say.” seem much bigger to me than a fraction of the audience that hasn’t picked up that convention AND will be blocked from reading by it.
I think a “Nth annual” is a good thing. It will be on the Amazon page (still not fully sure what the series title will be, by default something like “Best of LessWrong”), and of course we will have a section on the site that will organize the books in order, after we released more than one. But having each individual book be prominently stand-alone seems pretty important to me, and also having a prominent series title for the first book, or book set, in a series seems also kind of unnecessary to me. If we’ve done three of those, then maybe there is a benefit that people get from knowing what series it is part of, but for the first one, the info seems really unnecessary for the vast majority of readers.
I also don’t want to commit us too hard to doing a book every year. Like, I know we want to do a book for this year’s (2019) review, but I really don’t know yet whether we will do one for next year, and also the book for this year’s review might look so totally different that putting them in a series doesn’t really make sense. Starting a whole series title and then abandoning it seems pretty bad to me, if you don’t even know whether it will have more than two entries.