“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)!
“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)!