Every few months someone tells me to produce short-form video on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Or post daily on LinkedIn. Or start a podcast. They're probably right, I nod, and then I go back to writing. I write for our businesses mostly, and in the background, books.
I know how that sounds. Everyone's leaving the page for the feed, and here I am, still on the page.
But a book is still the most complete way I know to move an idea from one head into another. An article teaches you one thing. A podcast follows one conversation. A video holds one moment. A book hands you a whole way of seeing something – the entire model, not the highlight reel.
The catch has always been that a book starts ageing the day it's printed. The 4-Hour Workweek couldn't grow up alongside remote work. The Everything Store couldn't keep up with Amazon – it took a second book to catch up. A book about AI from a year ago already reads like a period piece. That was never really the book's fault. It was paper's.
We don't have paper's excuse anymore, and some corners of publishing noticed long ago. Programming books already ship early, update often and carry version numbers like the software they describe. Almost nothing outside that world does. There's no good reason for it. A business book could work the same way.
1.2 adds a sharper framework. 1.5 rewrites the chapter that aged badly. 2.0 folds in a technology that didn't exist when the thing first shipped. Readers don't need a fresh edition every five years. They need the same book to get cleverer while they own it.
That's the one I want to write. Not because I think I'll nail it first time – if anything, the opposite. The point isn't a perfect object. It's the best explanation I've got today, then improved every few months as the world moves underneath it.
Here's the part I keep turning over. AI makes this more useful, not less. When information is infinite, the scarce thing becomes someone deciding what matters. When answers are everywhere, the rare thing is a mind that holds them together. A book is still one of the few places that actually happens.
So I'm still working on one – slowly. But I'm thinking releases, not editions.
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