Announcement: The Sequences eBook will be released in mid-March

There are a lot of reasons we're releasing the eBook early, including wanting community feedback on what people like in the existing text, what mistakes we've slipped in, etc. I don't want to make promises about how many small fixes will be incorporated into the print version, if any. Regardless, fixes might show up in second editions of the eBook and/or print books, so do clue us in if you spot mistakes. You can e-mail errata to errata@intelligence.org.

I don't expect any fixes to be incorporated into the audio books, because it takes a lot of resources to re-record anything. Castify has been working on creating the audio book for months, in parallel with our putting finishing touches on the eBook. In some cases the recording will actually correspond more closely to Eliezer's original prose than the eBook does.

I want a leatherbound hardcopy. This is fanboyism.

I very, very bad at reading on my tablet or laptop, too many distractions. I take a paper book, go to bed, shut out everything, and read even the hardest topics.

I am a book fanboy, who has a deep and abiding admiration for physical libraries. Nevertheless, I have found the e-ink Kindle to be an adequate book substitute, and this is particularly true for long-form books. Among other things, there's no backlight, so I can use a red lamp and not inhibit melatonin production. Since Amazon is running a sale on it now, I think it's worth getting a Kindle to try it out--if you end up liking it enough to switch, the eventual savings of buying cheaper versions of books will pay for the Kindle fairly quickly.

I'm reading through the Romance of Three Kingdoms right now, and while my translation (downloaded for free!) occupies well over a thousand pages, the Kindle takes up the same amount of hand-space as always. And when I want to switch to any of the other books I'm reading, they're a few button presses away.

It will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. So you can freely copy, distribute, transmit, or adapt the work, provided you (a) note who made the original, (b) don't use the content commercially, and (c) make your adaptation free for others to copy/distribute/transmit/adapt in turn.

The novel content is nearly all my doing, with input and ideas from MIRI staff and volunteers.

I think it should be linked from the last chapter of HPMoR.

Yes, if the project is ready in time we'd like to use HPMoR's conclusion to advertise it.

Why release on the 15th as opposed to, e.g., the 13th?

Also, any complete list of sequence posts will include posts higher in the list that depend on ones lower in the list, because Eliezer went back and edited some of his earlier posts to refer to later ones. The chronological reading has advantages, but has the problem of being more meandering and disjointed and doesn't fully solve the interdependency problem.

No, and I think reading the R:AZ essays in their new order will work better than reading that subset in strict chronological order. Still, that's one of a few features i'd like to introduce in the print versions, and in future versions of the eBook. Perhaps a general chronological list that includes posts that weren't in the eBook too, and marks the eBook-included posts in bold.

We may do a staggered release for the print version. Splitting up the eBook might have given people headaches because of all the clickable links between different parts of the book.

My hope is that Book I of the eBook (Map and Territory), which will be released as its own print volume, will be able to serve a purpose a bit like that. Book II (How to Actually Change Your Mind) may also be viable as a stand-alone work, though its main intended audience is people who have read Map and Territory.

Compressing the entire 1800 pages into just 300 pages is a harder task, since it would require rewriting a lot of material. At that point it might be more useful to just write an entirely new rationality handbook loosely inspired by the Sequences.

My advice to people who want to promote the sequences in their new form would be 'Try lots of things and report back about what works/doesn't.' Focus primarily on people who are already interested in science, philosophy, and math (or at least two of those three), and keep in mind that the book will criticize religions quite a bit (e.g., Religion's Claim To Be Non-Disprovable and posts from 'Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions') very early on.

Methods fans may be interested (since they already like Eliezer's writing style, and Methods itself is ending). Vaniver suggested that diving straight from a 2000-page Eliezer tome (Methods) to an 1800-page one (Rationality: From AI to Zombies) might feel overwhelming without some kind of break, but I still feel this is a good time to get the word out about the eBook. In terms of larger-scale projects, I love the idea of a fan-led effort to annotate Methods and e.g. cross-reference its contents to relevant parts of R:AZ.

If things go well, we plan to market the print volumes (and maybe similar-sized eBooks) in a more robust way, since a 300-page book is a much easier sell than an 1800-page one.

You can find the FOOM debate eBook here: https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/

No. There's already an ebook for that btw, and can be found on the seqences less wrong page.

Castify: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1267969302/lesswrong-the-sequences-audiobook

My vague impression is that the entire set of audio books will cost about $50 total, and will come out not terribly long after March (or perhaps in late March).

The print books are probably further off. I'd like to see how people react to the eBook, and what uses they put it to, before that project gets properly started.