As a big fan of yours, I have to say I'm mainly excited about the condensed version. I don't see the point in buying something that's already available on the internet. Something with all the key ideas distilled down and integrated more deeply than you would blog posts--that, though, could be useful even to someone who's read all your posts and wants the big picture, and it means something I can recommend to family and watch climb the bestseller lists (hopefully!) The self-published book would only be useful for boosting your sales pitch to publishers, but won't work well even for that if too many people feel as I do. If you're worried about your credentials for making a pitch to publishers, I recommend trying to publish more short printed pieces (magazine/journal articles, book chapters, etc.) But I may be the exception in my thinking on this.
One million cumulative daily visits! Woot n' stuff. Also we're in the top 5,000 of all blogs on Technorati, and one of the top 10 econblogs by Technorati rank.
Seems like a good time to mention that I'll be appearing at Penguicon, a combination open-source/science-fiction convention in Troy, MI, Apr 18-20, as a Nifty. I'll be doing an intro to Bayesian reasoning that you probably don't need if you're reading this, possibly a panel on the Virtues of a Rationalist, some stuff on human intelligence upgrades, and definitely "The Ethics of Ending the World" with Aaron Diaz (Dresden Codak).
After the jump, you can see some proposed cover art for the blook.
For the benefit of the humor impaired: Yes, this is a joke. Erin, my girlfriend, Photoshopped this when she heard I was planning to do a book.
This is all taking longer than I expected - as expected - but I do think I'm getting there.
My current serious strategy for the blook is as follows:
If you've got more experience in the publishing industry and you see some reason that any of this won't work, i.e., "No one will talk to you if you've ever done anything with Wowio or Lulu" or "Today's readers don't want short popular books, they want 500-page tomes" or something like that, please email me or comment.