First, to maintain the similarity to upcoming HPMoR release dates; saying "this is the final chapter of this story, but the next text released by Eliezer comes out at 10:00 AM Pacific Time on March 15th, and is a nonfiction work explaining the actual methods of rationality" seems like it will manage to capture many HPMoR readers whose attention Eliezer might not have again. I suspect that a day-long wait before release does a good job of accruing benefits from anticipation without paying too many costs from exhaustion or attention loss.
Second, I assume that it will be easier to release it on the 15th than the 14th, and the 14th will be easier than the 13th, and so on.
The Sequences are being released as an eBook, titled Rationality: From AI to Zombies, on March 12.
We went with the name "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" (based on shminux's suggestion) to make it clearer to people — who might otherwise be expecting a self-help book, or an academic text — that the style and contents of the Sequences are rather unusual. We want to filter for readers who have a wide-ranging interest in (/ tolerance for) weird intellectual topics. Alternative options tended to obscure what the book is about, or obscure its breadth / eclecticism.
The book's contents
Around 340 of Eliezer's essays from 2009 and earlier will be included, collected into twenty-six sections ("sequences"), compiled into six books:
The six books will be released as a single sprawling eBook, making it easy to hop back and forth between different parts of the book. The whole book will be about 1,800 pages long. However, we'll also be releasing the same content as a series of six print books (and as six audio books) at a future date.
The Sequences have been tidied up in a number of small ways, but the content is mostly unchanged. The largest change is to how the content is organized. Some important Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong posts that were never officially sorted into sequences have now been added — 58 additions in all, forming four entirely new sequences (and also supplementing some existing sequences). Other posts have been removed — 105 in total. The following old sequences will be the most heavily affected:
I'll provide more details on these changes when the eBook is out.
Unlike the print and audio-book versions, the eBook version of Rationality: From AI to Zombies will be entirely free. If you want to purchase it on Kindle Store and download it directly to your Kindle, it will also be available on Amazon for $4.99.
To make the content more accessible, the eBook will include introductions I've written up for this purpose. It will also include a LessWrongWiki link to a glossary, which I'll be recruiting LessWrongers to help populate with explanations of references and jargon from the Sequences.
I'll post an announcement to Main as soon as the eBook is available. See you then!