"I agree, but Eli has already announced his intentions to rewrite most of the material, which will require a great deal of work."
Indeed, but less than coming up with it in the first place, and the total return on investment will likely be much higher.
f.ex., if for 1000 hours of work he got 5,000 regular readers here, for 1300 hours of work he might be able to get 100,000+ (not all at once, but over a few years) with relatively little overlap between both groups.
"Publishing this kind of a book is essentially a shotgun approach"
I'm not sure I completely agree with that. There is certainly a shotgun element, but book readers - like blog readers - are also self-selecting, and it is very unlikely that everybody who would select it is already reading this blog. And if they are now, will they be in 3 years?
"The blog posts, so far as I can tell, are doing as well a job of teaching their readers as can reasonably be expected."
I would argue that a book would be better at teaching. Personally, I know that on some days I missed posts for one reason or another (traveling, too busy, whatever), and by the time I started reading again I had a long backlog, which was tedious to read on the screen, etc. There's simply a bigger barrier to entry, especially for people who aren't already convinced, or people who simply don't read much on the net in their free time but pick up lots of books.
Newcomers might also find this blog and see a hard post that belong in the middle of a series (or simply something that happens to not interest them) and simply give up and not come back. I suspect this is happening every day. With a book, you have the benefit of having everybody start from the beginning and you can gradually hook them.
" We will need to prepare something for the next generation, but that's caused by the nature of blogging, not some deficiency in Eli's postings."
Exactly. The current format is crippling the potential of the material, so onward with the book(s)!
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.