Distribution is the job now.

Right now, the work I’m doing on this book is distribution. I spent years writing the thing, and at some point the writing stops being the job and getting it in front of people starts being the job, and I’ve crossed that line. So this post is me saying plainly what’s available and where.

Writing a book is an old-fashioned thing to do. It still carries a certain status — tell someone you wrote a book and they’ll say wow, that’s impressive, and they mean it. But here’s what puzzles me about that: I could write a couple hundred blog posts making the same arguments, saying the same things at the same length, and nobody would call it impressive. Nobody would even call it a book. A book is roughly a couple hundred posts worth of thinking stapled together, and the stapling is what earns the status. I’m not complaining about that. I just think it’s worth noticing, because the status and the reach are two different things and only one of them does you any good.

So the reach part: the entire book is readable online, free, right now. Go to theshore.ai and click “Read free online.” That’s the whole book, chapter by chapter, in your browser, no email, no signup, no cost. The research companion is there too, and it has been for a while. I’d rather have ten thousand people read it free than have the manuscript sit in a file, and every week that goes by I feel that more strongly.

If you want the actual book — and some people genuinely do, and I understand it — the paper copy and the ebook are both still there. There’s something to the object: the way it feels in a bag, the way it sits on a shelf, the way you can lend it to someone and watch them not return it. That’s the pomp and circumstance of a book and it’s real. Buying it is a fine way to read it. I just don’t want the format to be the barrier. If the choice is between someone reading it on a phone during a commute or not reading it at all, I pick the phone every time.

The other thing I changed is the site itself. It now leads with the writing — the blog and the book together — instead of treating the blog as a side channel that occasionally points at the product. Partly that’s just honesty about where the work is. Mostly it’s because the more I write about the ideas in the book, the clearer it gets that treating “the book” as the single unit of output stopped working decades ago. That’s not how writing gets made anymore and it’s not how it gets read. The book is one artifact among several, and the essays around it are part of the same argument. So the site treats them that way.

That’s where things stand. The book is available — free online if you want it that way, paper or ebook if you don’t. And if you do read it, I want to hear from you, including and especially if you hate it. I mean that. Everyone who reads something and likes it tells you it’s good in the same four words. The people who think it’s awful will tell you why, in detail, at length, sometimes in all caps, and that’s the feedback that actually changes a book. Tell me it’s awful. I’m listening.