I wonder if it would make sense to also make a "best before 2018" compilation (excluding the Sequences). The number of articles per year was much smaller, but maybe all of them taken together would be enough.
(Alternatively, maybe include the old articles in the next round, i.e. make it "2021, plus a few ancient articles". That seems a bit weird, but probably requires much less extra work.)
Wow, that's a great page! Apparently each book is available as an online sequence, including the ability to track reading progress etc., minus whatever edits have been made to the essays for print publication.
Re: selling books globally: apparently as part of "Fulfillment by Amazon", there's an Amazon program nowadays where Amazon does all the international stuff for you, by purchasing inventory from you and then reselling it abroad. The details in Amazon Seller Central Europe are here (login required). I don't know how well this works, or if a similar program is available in the US.
Anyway, here's an excerpt:
With Amazon’s global program, sellers can increase revenue and expand their reach with minimal effort. Let us manage cross-border fulfillment, international returns and translations of product descriptions for you.
Through our program, we can purchase your products at your offer price on your European store, and sell them on other Amazon global stores. Global stores could include the UK, the EU, and other countries where you are not currently selling.
If we purchase your inventory, your selling experience is similar to a Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) domestic sale. The program doesn’t have an additional fee and won’t impact your sales to other domestic or international customers. Standard FBA fees for domestic sales will apply.
...
How do I sign up?
All eligible sellers are automatically enrolled in the program. To confirm your enrollment status, go to Settings in Seller Central, and select Fulfillment by Amazon. Search for Allow Amazon to buy my products to sell globally and click EDIT. If you see global stores that are enabled, your seller account is enrolled. If you do not see this option, your account is not currently eligible for the program.
...
Where will Amazon sell my products?
As part of the program, your products can be sold on any other Amazon global stores. To customize which global stores your products can be sold in, go to Fulfillment by Amazon settings and select Edit next to Allow Amazon to buy my products to sell globally. This will allow you to choose the global stores you want to sell into.
1Thanks. I just checked on Amazon DE and UK, and the book is indeed available for sale there, presumably offered by Amazon buying your own inventory as per the above, and (at least in Germany) they just include shipping and their resale profit margin in the sticker price (rather than e.g. including a separate price for shipping).
Amazon DE: 38€ (~$40), ships to Germany, no idea whether it also ships elsewhere in Europe.
Amazon UK: £27.5 (~$33.5, shipping might not be included), ships to the UK, no idea whether it also ships elsewhere.
Amazon Australia, Amazon Singapore (both listed as item currently unavailable)
(While DE and UK seem cheaper than ordering directly from the US, I haven't checked the same for the other stores.)
So it might be worth adjusting the answers to the first two questions of the FAQ to sth like: "We only directly sell on Amazon US. Plus Amazon might conceivably sell the books, with no input from us, in your country's local Amazon store; here are links to the stores we're aware of. If the books are not available in your country's Amazon store, try briefly googling them, and if none of the Amazon stores (incl. Amazon US) ship to you, then they're unfortunately not available".
(I hadn’t checked before now because I’ve just already spent a ton of time doing book admin this year and was fairly exhausted from it. )
1You definitely want to read these as physical books if the option is available. Screens are distracting, there's the inescapable urge to create a new tab to do whatever, basically whenever you spend even a second not feeling super engaged (doesn't matter what causes that second). There's also even worse reasons that I'm not willing to mention in public.
Zvi also makes a solid case for why smartphones are terrible here.
Counterpoints to reading physical books:
- The ability to highlight digital text is leaps and bounds over that of physical text. What's the point of reading dozens of LW essays if I'm going to forget almost everything therein within months? My memory is particularly bad, but the problem of forgetting most of what one reads is ubiquitous. The recommended remedy for forgetfulness is to use spaced repetition, but how do you generate the cards in your spaced repetition system without digital copyable highlights?
- How do you read a physical book in the dark if there's no backlighting? Of course you can turn on a lamp, but that solution is way worse.
- Also, where is text-to-speech in physical books?
I agree that smartphones and browsers are terrible distraction devices, but they're not without significant advantages. And e-ink readers like the Kindle have some of these advantages, while having less of the corresponding disadvantages of the "smarter" devices.
Questions for the FAQ:
- Questions on editing:
- During print publication, what kinds of changes, if any, have been made to the essays?
- Were there substantial edits?
- Are any edited essays considered, by you and/or the author(s), to be significantly "better" than the original online versions?
- Who edits these books, anyway?
- How much time and effort did it altogether take to create these books?
- Were there any other essays which scored highly in the 2020 review, which you would've liked to include in these books, but had to cut either for length reasons or otherwise?
I love these book sets and I will keep buying them as they come out. They are also in my list of "books to gift people when the occasions come up".
Also thank you for putting the first set back into print!
(Also please being back that printed Highlights From The Sequences, that's my favorite one and I want to gift it to people, but I only got a copy from EAG once. There's an underrated benefit to giving someone a physical book; Many people feel more psychologically interested in reading a physical book that takes up space (and is designed really well!), but would ignore the same content sent as a web link / index-of-blogposts.)
Yes! I'm quite sad that I'm about to finish the physical "How to Actually Change Your Mind". I aim to read all of RFATZ but it's about to be a lot harder when I have to do it on my computer. I hope that the other books will magically come into print exactly when I finish the book.
If this book was just published, why is the publication date on Amazon set to January 1, 2023? And is the print length really exactly 1000 pages? Maybe some of the metadata on Amazon is wrong?
(note: Amazon only lets us have a certain number of books in stock at a time, so it's moderately likely that well sell out of the current supply, and then need to restock which may take a week or so)
Great, thanks!
I am holding the books in my hands, and I have a question: Who is the author of the forewords?
They are written in the first person singular, at least to some extent, e.g. the quoted foreword says:
Many people I know grew exhausted from negotiating, and gave up on trying to visit their friends.
Hence the question :-)
Thanks for the awesome edition!
The forwards are each by either me or Ruby, but each of them had enough design-by-committee nature that it didn't feel quite right giving them a single author. (I wrote the particular line you quote)
It is not, the reason for which is "it's extra work and we haven't done it and are fairly busy."
(Note you can read the posts online. I have a partly completed auto-ebook-maker that converts LessWrong Sequences to ebooks but ran into a couple difficulties I never got around to finishing)
On the off-chance you are unaware: There are some existing tools for converting web pages into ebooks that are configurable to handle different web sites, such as the browser plug-in WebToEpub. I haven't tried using one of these on LessWrong, but it seems like that would be worth trying before creating an original tool. I did manage to use it to make myself an ebook of Unsong at one point.
The Carving of Reality, third volume of the Best of LessWrong books is now available on Amazon (US).
The Carving of Reality includes 43 essays from 29 authors. We've collected the essays into four books, each exploring two related topics. The "two intertwining themes" concept was first inspired when as I looked over the cluster of "coordination" themed posts, and noting a recurring motif of not only "solving coordination problems" but also "dealing with the binding constraints that were causing those coordination problems."
I've included the foreword from "Coordination & Constraint", which I think conveys the overall spirit and context of the books:
COORDINATION & CONSTRAINT
Elizabeth Van Nostrand
How do you know?"
Most Stag Hunts are Schelling Problems
More than You ever Wanted to Know (I.)
ALIGNMENT & AGENCY
Essays about how agency works, and how we might successfully build an AI agent more powerful than us that does what we actually want.
Are A Function Of Humans' Latent Variables
TIMELINES & TAKEOFF
Essays about when (and how) powerful technology might permanently alter our world.
The Trick that Might or Might Not Work
REALITY & REASON
Essays about how to build an accurate map that reflects the underlying territory.
Diffractor
FAQ[1]
How do I acquire the books?
The Carving of Reality is available on Amazon (US) for $30.
Are they available in other countries?
Alas, we don't have the bandwidth to do the logistics necessary to get it formally set up a listing for other countries. (Sorry about this! We did this the first year and it unfortunately turned out to be extremely effort-prohibitive)
How did you make the art?
The art was AI generated, using Midjourney version 4.
Are there any egregious printing errors you're embarrassed about?
Sigh, yeah. Most notably, we ended up with a misaligned "LessWrong" logo on the spine of the Coordination book. However, some say this simply reality demonstrating that coordination is hard, with one book deciding to do its own thing and ruin the aesthetic for everyone.
Are previous book sets still available?
Yes! You can also buy copies of A Map That Reflects The Territory and The Engines of Cognition.
By which I mean "questions that nobody has actually asked yet but I vaguely anticipate people asking."