One of the big advantages of writing a book is that they're an excuse to go on podcasts and talk shows and stuff. You could write a minimum effort book that's just a collection of posts, but leverage that into a media tour that spreads your ideas farther than they would otherwise.
I was about to say that blog posts are probably a better way to spread ideas than books (people who buy books on Libertarianism tend to be Libertarians, on climate scepticism tend to be climate sceptics - especially now you can Google your way into a rudimentary grounding in anything your curious about). Having an excuse to get on the podcast circuit is a valid point though, if you want to reach people who aren't yet exposed/interested in an idea to have Googled it yet.
I would say definitely keep writing books. The main benefit would be to organize your posts into narrative and print them on paper, even if the narrative is just collecting your favorite posts of a certain type and ordering them as you feel is best. I suggest a few smaller books like Bryan Caplan is doing. For $10 I can read all of Bryan’s self-help themed posts. This exposed me to a dozen posts of his I had apparently missed over the years. It allows me to make notes and highlight my favorite parts. My kids might find such book one day and see my highlights. Books still hold prestige. They can be used in classrooms and book clubs. They can be given as gifts or loaned out. They give you a chance to put a pretty picture on the front. They will likely bring about interview opportunities and I hope an Econtalk episode.
In summary a book can make for very convenient and fast reading. Paper is still the best medium for reading in terms of beauty. It’s also hard to forget about a book that you own. Posts on the other hand are more easily forgotten. Yes, there is more to read now than ever before, but your job is to move your work to the top of a reader’s list of things to read next. A book will help move your ideas up a few significant increments on reading lists for thousands of people.
Can I make one more suggestion? I think that you should try for a book or two aimed at middle schoolers. It could be something like Animal Farm. Or it could be in the future; imagining a society with certain freedoms that don’t currently exist. When I ask people how they came to be libertarian the responses are often surprising to me. Many people have not read any of the books I’ve read and know nothing of the libertarians that I know. The most common entry into libertarianism seems to be Rand. We need to target younger readers.
Are Bryan's books simply his podcasts printed out or has he rewritten them to convert the ideas in the books into an integrated discussion of the subject?
It would be trivial to do the former, a good deal of work to do the latter.
His book *Don't Be a Feminist* was published in 2022. Each chapter ends with a date, like March 24, 2021, or November 11, 2011, suggesting that he organized and printed his blog posts as a book.
"The title essay of Don’t Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice is called “Don’t Be a Feminist: A Letter to My Daughter.” While the book is a thematic selection of my best EconLog essays from 2005-2022, the first piece is entirely new. As you’d expect, I write this essay as if I’m speaking directly to Valeria Caplan, my youngest child. To pique your interest, here are a few highlights. (endnotes omitted throughout)"
There are no additional introductions, prefaces, conclusions or epilogues that suggest custom writing for the book.
Following the text of each chapter is the date it was written (i.e. except for the lead essay, this is the date of the blog post) followed by Notes. These Notes are just references to the articles that he links to in the blog post. So these Notes are the main work of writing the book: taking each embedded link and referring to it in the Notes.
I read "Legal Systems", "Machinery of Freedom", and some of your blog posts.
I think books have some key advantages over blog posts.
1) The ideas in "Legal Systems" in particular stick in my head much more than those of a blog posts. This is because the book had an overarching theme that really invites the reader in to your distinct way of thinking. Blog posts don't achieve that as well.
2) Books have more longevity. People are much likelier to read a 20 year old book than a 20 year old blog post
3) While both blog posts and books are shared, the former is usually shared in communities adjacent to the blog itself, while books spread easier far afield. The opportunity to do podcast tours is part of this, so is Scott Alexander's review of "Legal Systems"
I'd like Substack to allow adding self-contained topics / books with one chapter per post, and the main index would only be to the topic / book. But last time I checked, there was no feedback or suggestion link. Maybe I'll look again.
I have a list of posts, each title linked to the post, sorted by topic, on my web page. Isn't that equivalent to your book with one chapter per post? I have a search window to search all my posts and most of my other writing. Isn't that equivalent to your index, but covering more? I link to both of those at the bottom of every post. What more would you want?
Maybe that is what I want. I'm pretty new to Substack and find myself still trying to make it do what I want without always understanding exactly what it can do that I don't know about.
They do have two suggestion posts, one for readers and one for writers. Almost no traffic. last posts were 2023. Don't know how I missed them before but it looks like I didn't miss much.
The main issue with blogging is that most readers will only read the latest posts. I have spent time reading older posts on my three favourite blogs after discovering them and some of yours but I would expect this to be an exception.
Besides, I have read quite a few books from the 19th and 20th century way after they were published (including one of yours).
Therefore, I would encourage book publication but I may be old school.
Judging by comments, at least some of my readers read old posts, although that may in part be old posts that are referred to and linked to in new posts. I have, at the bottom of every post, a link to a list of past posts sorted by topic and another link to a search window that you can use to find and read what I have written about some topic in the past. Both are designed to get people to read old posts but I am not sure how successful they are.
I go back and read older posts of yours sometimes, but I only want to read the best ones and I usually stop after reading some of the more middling quality ones. I am happy to read your shower thoughts on how 2024 is going in 2024- I don't like reading your shower thoughts on how 2012 is going in 2024, and it can be hard separating those out when going through an archive.
I've been writing Substacks for less than two years, but Substack shows all my old blog posts, which go back almost twenty years, as if they were Substack posts.
The sorted list of posts on my web page, which I link to at the bottom of every post, is only the Substack posts, so since early last year.
Books still hit home. In addition to the physical book are the various electric versions. Blog posts and substacks I view as ephemera. Very little long-term impact, and only on your already-existing fan base, and constantly buried under new posts from other writers.
I would love a book on climate, but unless I have missed some of your discussion, I doubt there are enough posts to justify a book. Perhaps combine the climate topic with the finding truth topic. Make the book a debate about the debate. Not simply climate, but using climate as an example about how we determine who to trust and what to believe in cases where the truth is hard to determine.
Leverage your fan base. With minimal encouragement I suspect we can comb your old posts and suggest specific ones. I don't doubt there are several editors among your readers. I do proofreading for fun for various sci-fi authors.
There are 25 posts on climate and they cover pretty much everything I have to say on the subject. It occurs to me that I could include my old piece on population as an appendix, since it is the same approach applied to an earlier purported catastrophe.
I like books generally and I like your books in particular, so I hope you write some more. I am, however, 64. Most of my students (master's level for the most part) do not read books. If you are aiming at young people, I think you need things like Caplan's graphic novels. OTOH, books get bought by libraries and so are available to people even if a platform vanishes.
Depends, one of my beefs with folks like David Bernstein, etc is they pimp their books on their blog, you buy them thinking something novel, and then you realize they've already said 99% of it before on the blog and end up feeling like you got ripped off. I feel if you are going to do a collection, rather than new writings , it should be one that cherry picks over your lifetime in a sort of "best of" even if grouped thematically, I think a good example of this is "No Quarter" by William Norman Grigg.
I get the advantage of libraries, media promotions, etc and trying to reach a new audience but I question the effectiveness of that in practice so I guess it's more of a time thing, i.e. if you just enjoy writing, does it really matter if it's not commercially successful?
I think climate and how to determine what is true are the two subjects where what I write is most important — most of the economics is already in my books and academic articles. On climate I have an unusual position and, I think, a lot of evidence for it that people are not familiar with. Finding out what is true is a problem we are all faced with, and the internet an interesting environment to deal with it in.
After reading the comments and replies and thinking a bit more, I believe climate + how to determine truth + an appendix on population would make the most useful and most widely read book.
It would exemplify the economic way of thinking: Not so much who is guilty [here capitalism] but what are the consequences? And what are the costs and benefits.
Given you have a free online copy of Legal Systems (or at least of a late draft) it's reach may be substantially wider (I read it there and have been seen links to it multiple times) the the sales numbers. Books also get you into libraries which may reach an expanded or different audience. On the flip side blogging gets you into search engines.
I am supposed to be able to get information on how much things on my web page get accessed, but it doesn't seem to be working. You are right that I should count people who access my books through my web page.
I thinks books are still the way to go for long term durability. Too many blogs I used to read 20 years ago are now defunct, not only no longer updating but no longer extant online. A book can sit on a shelf for decades and still be found and read. How long past the publishing life of an author will their blog keep going? How many years did they pay the hosting service?
There might be a business in hosting defunct web pages and blogs as a sort of digital library, the JSTOR of random crap people wrote once, but I kind of doubt anyone would try and make money off it.
I did not know that existed as a business. I always assumed it was just someone’s hobby, and would go defunct shortly after they themselves did. That is reassuring.
I think it is a charity rather than a business but it has been around for quite a long time and I doubt could be maintained as one person's hobby unless he was very wealthy. It archives essentially the entire web.
TBH it's not as good as David makes it out. First off it suffers from the all your eggs in one basket problem whereas libraries are distributed; and that's important in times of complete societal collapse, think of how most of the famous works of antiquity would have been completely lost during the Dark Age had not some people in Ireland and Baghdad not squirreled away a copy.
Second in practice as a result of space limitations or content restrictions, a lot of sites or online material never make it into the Wayback Machine. Sure libraries do the same, they don't own every book, but the aggregate of libraries, public and private, worldwide generally do in multiples whereas like I said above, one company archives the Internet.
The loss of information concerns me too especially with the rise of LLM AI queries as content excluded from the learning set will, if you project forward, get lost to history under the guide of misinformation, woke, government mandated filters, etc. You already see that in film, music, and imagery where the AI (and search engines) refuse to link or provide them as we enter a new golden age of Neo-Puritanism. Physical media avoids this sort of modern book burning, i.e. the online memory hole is a real problem now and will only get worse.
A "Climate" collection would be convenient and useful, since it might include some "Discovering Truth" material. An "Austrian School should grow to absorb Marshall" would be a harder book to read but would have, eventually, more profound results.
To do your second I would first have to figure out what the Austrian School adds to Marshall. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something, although when I did a debate on the subject I don't think my opponent offered anything I found convincing.
Thank you for the reply. Based on this, and on a couple of other things I have read recently, I guess I will have to re-learn—no, strike that: finally learn economics.
I have a book for that: Hidden Order. It isn't on my web page but if you have Amazon's Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free and if you don't the Kindle is only five dollars.
I've written several thousand posts to Quora, mostly about technical topics, especially database management and database design and architecture. I often wonder about writing a textbook, but few people buy physical textbooks nowadays, while some of my Quora posts have been read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I'm also too lazy to do the deep organizing I'd need to do there, and I wonder how many people actually use textbooks anymore, versus just using search engines to look up things like my old Quora posts!
One of the big advantages of writing a book is that they're an excuse to go on podcasts and talk shows and stuff. You could write a minimum effort book that's just a collection of posts, but leverage that into a media tour that spreads your ideas farther than they would otherwise.
I was about to say that blog posts are probably a better way to spread ideas than books (people who buy books on Libertarianism tend to be Libertarians, on climate scepticism tend to be climate sceptics - especially now you can Google your way into a rudimentary grounding in anything your curious about). Having an excuse to get on the podcast circuit is a valid point though, if you want to reach people who aren't yet exposed/interested in an idea to have Googled it yet.
I would say definitely keep writing books. The main benefit would be to organize your posts into narrative and print them on paper, even if the narrative is just collecting your favorite posts of a certain type and ordering them as you feel is best. I suggest a few smaller books like Bryan Caplan is doing. For $10 I can read all of Bryan’s self-help themed posts. This exposed me to a dozen posts of his I had apparently missed over the years. It allows me to make notes and highlight my favorite parts. My kids might find such book one day and see my highlights. Books still hold prestige. They can be used in classrooms and book clubs. They can be given as gifts or loaned out. They give you a chance to put a pretty picture on the front. They will likely bring about interview opportunities and I hope an Econtalk episode.
In summary a book can make for very convenient and fast reading. Paper is still the best medium for reading in terms of beauty. It’s also hard to forget about a book that you own. Posts on the other hand are more easily forgotten. Yes, there is more to read now than ever before, but your job is to move your work to the top of a reader’s list of things to read next. A book will help move your ideas up a few significant increments on reading lists for thousands of people.
Can I make one more suggestion? I think that you should try for a book or two aimed at middle schoolers. It could be something like Animal Farm. Or it could be in the future; imagining a society with certain freedoms that don’t currently exist. When I ask people how they came to be libertarian the responses are often surprising to me. Many people have not read any of the books I’ve read and know nothing of the libertarians that I know. The most common entry into libertarianism seems to be Rand. We need to target younger readers.
Thanks. I've emailed Bryan to get his views on the question.
Are Bryan's books simply his podcasts printed out or has he rewritten them to convert the ideas in the books into an integrated discussion of the subject?
It would be trivial to do the former, a good deal of work to do the latter.
His book *Don't Be a Feminist* was published in 2022. Each chapter ends with a date, like March 24, 2021, or November 11, 2011, suggesting that he organized and printed his blog posts as a book.
But for his lead essay he says:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/dont-be-a-feminist-highlights?utm_source=publication-search
"The title essay of Don’t Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice is called “Don’t Be a Feminist: A Letter to My Daughter.” While the book is a thematic selection of my best EconLog essays from 2005-2022, the first piece is entirely new. As you’d expect, I write this essay as if I’m speaking directly to Valeria Caplan, my youngest child. To pique your interest, here are a few highlights. (endnotes omitted throughout)"
There are no additional introductions, prefaces, conclusions or epilogues that suggest custom writing for the book.
Following the text of each chapter is the date it was written (i.e. except for the lead essay, this is the date of the blog post) followed by Notes. These Notes are just references to the articles that he links to in the blog post. So these Notes are the main work of writing the book: taking each embedded link and referring to it in the Notes.
Thanks. Sounds like a lot less work than what I was planning, might be worth considering.
I read "Legal Systems", "Machinery of Freedom", and some of your blog posts.
I think books have some key advantages over blog posts.
1) The ideas in "Legal Systems" in particular stick in my head much more than those of a blog posts. This is because the book had an overarching theme that really invites the reader in to your distinct way of thinking. Blog posts don't achieve that as well.
2) Books have more longevity. People are much likelier to read a 20 year old book than a 20 year old blog post
3) While both blog posts and books are shared, the former is usually shared in communities adjacent to the blog itself, while books spread easier far afield. The opportunity to do podcast tours is part of this, so is Scott Alexander's review of "Legal Systems"
I'd like Substack to allow adding self-contained topics / books with one chapter per post, and the main index would only be to the topic / book. But last time I checked, there was no feedback or suggestion link. Maybe I'll look again.
I have a list of posts, each title linked to the post, sorted by topic, on my web page. Isn't that equivalent to your book with one chapter per post? I have a search window to search all my posts and most of my other writing. Isn't that equivalent to your index, but covering more? I link to both of those at the bottom of every post. What more would you want?
Maybe that is what I want. I'm pretty new to Substack and find myself still trying to make it do what I want without always understanding exactly what it can do that I don't know about.
Me too.
They do have two suggestion posts, one for readers and one for writers. Almost no traffic. last posts were 2023. Don't know how I missed them before but it looks like I didn't miss much.
The main issue with blogging is that most readers will only read the latest posts. I have spent time reading older posts on my three favourite blogs after discovering them and some of yours but I would expect this to be an exception.
Besides, I have read quite a few books from the 19th and 20th century way after they were published (including one of yours).
Therefore, I would encourage book publication but I may be old school.
Judging by comments, at least some of my readers read old posts, although that may in part be old posts that are referred to and linked to in new posts. I have, at the bottom of every post, a link to a list of past posts sorted by topic and another link to a search window that you can use to find and read what I have written about some topic in the past. Both are designed to get people to read old posts but I am not sure how successful they are.
I go back and read older posts of yours sometimes, but I only want to read the best ones and I usually stop after reading some of the more middling quality ones. I am happy to read your shower thoughts on how 2024 is going in 2024- I don't like reading your shower thoughts on how 2012 is going in 2024, and it can be hard separating those out when going through an archive.
I've been writing Substacks for less than two years, but Substack shows all my old blog posts, which go back almost twenty years, as if they were Substack posts.
The sorted list of posts on my web page, which I link to at the bottom of every post, is only the Substack posts, so since early last year.
Oh yes! A standalone book on climate is definitely worthwhile.
David,
I vote for a bunch of short books: climate change, economics and also how to think about the world.
Books still hit home. In addition to the physical book are the various electric versions. Blog posts and substacks I view as ephemera. Very little long-term impact, and only on your already-existing fan base, and constantly buried under new posts from other writers.
I would love a book on climate, but unless I have missed some of your discussion, I doubt there are enough posts to justify a book. Perhaps combine the climate topic with the finding truth topic. Make the book a debate about the debate. Not simply climate, but using climate as an example about how we determine who to trust and what to believe in cases where the truth is hard to determine.
Leverage your fan base. With minimal encouragement I suspect we can comb your old posts and suggest specific ones. I don't doubt there are several editors among your readers. I do proofreading for fun for various sci-fi authors.
I have an editor in-house — my daughter.
There are 25 posts on climate and they cover pretty much everything I have to say on the subject. It occurs to me that I could include my old piece on population as an appendix, since it is the same approach applied to an earlier purported catastrophe.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
Yes, please write books! They convey more authority, among other advantages.
I like books generally and I like your books in particular, so I hope you write some more. I am, however, 64. Most of my students (master's level for the most part) do not read books. If you are aiming at young people, I think you need things like Caplan's graphic novels. OTOH, books get bought by libraries and so are available to people even if a platform vanishes.
Depends, one of my beefs with folks like David Bernstein, etc is they pimp their books on their blog, you buy them thinking something novel, and then you realize they've already said 99% of it before on the blog and end up feeling like you got ripped off. I feel if you are going to do a collection, rather than new writings , it should be one that cherry picks over your lifetime in a sort of "best of" even if grouped thematically, I think a good example of this is "No Quarter" by William Norman Grigg.
I get the advantage of libraries, media promotions, etc and trying to reach a new audience but I question the effectiveness of that in practice so I guess it's more of a time thing, i.e. if you just enjoy writing, does it really matter if it's not commercially successful?
I think the highest intellectual value add would be climate.
I think climate and how to determine what is true are the two subjects where what I write is most important — most of the economics is already in my books and academic articles. On climate I have an unusual position and, I think, a lot of evidence for it that people are not familiar with. Finding out what is true is a problem we are all faced with, and the internet an interesting environment to deal with it in.
After reading the comments and replies and thinking a bit more, I believe climate + how to determine truth + an appendix on population would make the most useful and most widely read book.
It would exemplify the economic way of thinking: Not so much who is guilty [here capitalism] but what are the consequences? And what are the costs and benefits.
Given you have a free online copy of Legal Systems (or at least of a late draft) it's reach may be substantially wider (I read it there and have been seen links to it multiple times) the the sales numbers. Books also get you into libraries which may reach an expanded or different audience. On the flip side blogging gets you into search engines.
I am supposed to be able to get information on how much things on my web page get accessed, but it doesn't seem to be working. You are right that I should count people who access my books through my web page.
I thinks books are still the way to go for long term durability. Too many blogs I used to read 20 years ago are now defunct, not only no longer updating but no longer extant online. A book can sit on a shelf for decades and still be found and read. How long past the publishing life of an author will their blog keep going? How many years did they pay the hosting service?
There might be a business in hosting defunct web pages and blogs as a sort of digital library, the JSTOR of random crap people wrote once, but I kind of doubt anyone would try and make money off it.
The Internet Archive already exists and is searchable. What you describe is merely a subset of it.
I did not know that existed as a business. I always assumed it was just someone’s hobby, and would go defunct shortly after they themselves did. That is reassuring.
I think it is a charity rather than a business but it has been around for quite a long time and I doubt could be maintained as one person's hobby unless he was very wealthy. It archives essentially the entire web.
I should make another donation to it.
TBH it's not as good as David makes it out. First off it suffers from the all your eggs in one basket problem whereas libraries are distributed; and that's important in times of complete societal collapse, think of how most of the famous works of antiquity would have been completely lost during the Dark Age had not some people in Ireland and Baghdad not squirreled away a copy.
Second in practice as a result of space limitations or content restrictions, a lot of sites or online material never make it into the Wayback Machine. Sure libraries do the same, they don't own every book, but the aggregate of libraries, public and private, worldwide generally do in multiples whereas like I said above, one company archives the Internet.
The loss of information concerns me too especially with the rise of LLM AI queries as content excluded from the learning set will, if you project forward, get lost to history under the guide of misinformation, woke, government mandated filters, etc. You already see that in film, music, and imagery where the AI (and search engines) refuse to link or provide them as we enter a new golden age of Neo-Puritanism. Physical media avoids this sort of modern book burning, i.e. the online memory hole is a real problem now and will only get worse.
A "Climate" collection would be convenient and useful, since it might include some "Discovering Truth" material. An "Austrian School should grow to absorb Marshall" would be a harder book to read but would have, eventually, more profound results.
To do your second I would first have to figure out what the Austrian School adds to Marshall. I wouldn't be surprised if there is something, although when I did a debate on the subject I don't think my opponent offered anything I found convincing.
https://reason.com/podcast/2024/07/05/debate-austrian-vs-chicago-economics/
The only part of the Austrian School I have looked at carefully is Rothbard, and my conclusion on that was very negative: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/critique-of-a-version-of-austrian. There are clearly better Austrians but I haven't made a close study of them.
Thank you for the reply. Based on this, and on a couple of other things I have read recently, I guess I will have to re-learn—no, strike that: finally learn economics.
I have a book for that: Hidden Order. It isn't on my web page but if you have Amazon's Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free and if you don't the Kindle is only five dollars.
I am relieved. I was a little apprehensive about jumping immediately into Price Theory—Intermediate. Well, baby steps before I try to run, I guess.
If you are taking votes, I vote for short books on Climate and Discovering Truth.
I've written several thousand posts to Quora, mostly about technical topics, especially database management and database design and architecture. I often wonder about writing a textbook, but few people buy physical textbooks nowadays, while some of my Quora posts have been read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I'm also too lazy to do the deep organizing I'd need to do there, and I wonder how many people actually use textbooks anymore, versus just using search engines to look up things like my old Quora posts!