I’m Not Printing These Books Yet
This post is part of my Medium blog.
I can print Contingent and Essential. At some point, I probably will. But not yet.
That sounds strange if you grew up when I did. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the book was the thing you bought. If you owned it, you owned the knowledge. The physical object carried more authority than the contents sometimes deserved.
I still feel that pull. I can buy an EPUB and read it on my phone. I can tell myself I have the book. But some part of me still wants to hold it before I believe I own it. That part of me is old.
When I started writing books again, I fell straight into that instinct. The real output, I thought, was the physical artifact. The manuscript was only the stage before the thing became a book. The book became real when it had a cover, a spine, a page count, and a photograph I could post with the caption: “I wrote a book.”
I was wrong. I still like the physical book. It just isn’t the only version, and it may not be the most useful one.
I printed The Slop Codex and went through the whole process. I liked seeing the illustrations on paper. I liked the fact that a directory full of Markdown files had become an object somebody could put on a shelf. It was also a little ceremonial.
For a book whose subject changes, print is a poor place to put the final version. You can give it to somebody. You can take it to a conference. But if the book contains material you expect to correct or expand, the printed copy is already behind you by the time it arrives.
A printed book is a snapshot. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. A novel can be read without receiving a software update every Tuesday. A memoir can remain the thing it was when the author finished it.
But Contingent and Essential are part of a larger world. I expect to make small corrections and wording changes. The website has a timeline, an archive, fictional documents, reading materials, and an in-world records terminal. The books have somewhere to go after the last page.
That means the EPUB is the primary edition for now. Buy the books directly and you get a DRM-free file delivered to your inbox. If I fix a sentence, you should be able to receive the corrected version instead of owning the sentence with the typo forever because it was printed in October.
Some people will find that unsettling. We have been trained to think of a book as a stable object that contains a stable body of knowledge. You buy it. It sits on the shelf. It doesn’t change while you’re not looking. That stability is part of the emotional appeal.
An updateable book complicates that relationship. If the book changes, which one did you read? If a sentence is improved after you bought it, did you get the original book or the corrected one? If the author adds a document to the website that changes how you understand a scene, is that part of the book or something else?
I don’t have a final answer to those questions yet. I’m more interested in asking them than pretending the old answers still fit.
The publishing industry still has a strong relationship with booksellers, print schedules, and the idea that the book is complete when the production process ends. Distribution is hard. Physical inventory is real. Retailers need products they can list, price, ship, and return.
But that system is not the same thing as the reader’s relationship with a book. The reader doesn’t need the book to stop changing merely because the printer stopped working. The reader needs to know what they are buying, what will change, and what they can expect to receive later.
The reader needs a different contract.
If you buy Contingent or Essential directly from me, I want the relationship to continue after the download. You paid for the work. Your reaction should get my attention.
I also want the book to connect to other material without turning into a corny multimedia experience. Nobody needs a QR code in every paragraph.
But if the book mentions a fictional document, I may put the document on the website. The Condition Set already has a timeline, an archive, a ledger of real-world incidents and fictional echoes, a records terminal, and reading-club material. The website is not an advertisement for the books. It is part of the place the books describe.
There is even a generative AI records terminal. You can ask it questions about the book world. That doesn’t make it an authority. It makes it another way to explore the work.
The next step is giving readers somewhere to talk to each other. Not a comment box I ignore. Not a Discord server created in a burst of enthusiasm and abandoned two weeks later. A place where people can discuss the ideas in the book, find the related documents, and help shape what comes next.
I want the book to have an afterlife that isn’t just a second sales pitch.
For most of my life, a book was finished when the printer was finished. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
A book should be an experience you can enter, not an object that closes behind you.
image: /blog/images/books-are-experiences.jpg image_alt: "I’m Not Printing These Books Yet"
In The Slop Codex, this pattern appears as the gap between what we generate and what we can stand behind. The field guide tracks the symptoms: content that displaces human voice, systems that optimize for plausibility over truth, and the slow erosion of the line between real and synthetic. The counter-move is always the same: a named human who owns the output.
image: /blog/images/books-are-experiences.jpg image_alt: "I’m Not Printing These Books Yet"