Little Kid, Big Dreams

When I was younger, I had big dreams about becoming a writer. I wanted a human interest column in a local paper, I wanted to be able to travel the world and talk to interesting people, and I wanted to write books. This ultimately drove me to study journalism.

While the format changed over the years (ie: a newspaper column became a blog, the interviews became startup founders and customer discovery calls), the core desire stayed the same: To share ideas and stories with the world.

Since I've been using my blog to test out ideas in real time, least year, I tried remixing a lot of content about one topic (fractional work) convert into a book form. This took me one week.

I shared that resulting ebook with a literary agent. But they made it clear: Any use of AI was a hard no for traditional publishing. Then I spoke with a New York Times best-selling author who told me that people publish nonfiction books for one of three reasons:

1. To self-publish and own a niche

2. To get NYT best-seller status and do high-paid speaking gigs

3. To write a very short, topical and niche idea and make sure the very best 50 people read a book

When I told him I didn't relate to any of those ideas and just wanted to share a few ideas with a broad audience, he looked at me like I was crazy.

"You know it's considered a good things if even 10,000 people read your book right?"

That's about when I stopped being interested at all in traditional publishing.

My Pipe Dream for Publishing

A like a lot of things about regular publishing on the Internet. It forces me to crystallize ideas quickly, and it invites others to participate in the real-time discourse.

But there are still a lot of gaps in how I'd prefer to create and consume content online. Things that I think new technology can really help transform in incredible and new ways.

So, since I've abandoned my dream of traditional book publishing, here's my pipe dream for AI-enabled online publishing:

1. All content is remixable, tailored to you.

Consider: Customizable formats, styles, and tones for every reader

Think of a book you've always wanted to read but never managed to commit to. I'll take The Power Broker as my classic example here; it's sat on my shelf for at least 10 years, but I've never been able to get past the first 100 pages without distraction. In this case, I want to know the information, but I lack the focus to to sit down and read the book from cover-to-cover as it's designed.

Now imagine a version of "reading" that book, on your terms. I could instruct the mechanism to rework the storylines of The Power Broker and relate to a topic or theme more interesting to me, for instance the startup business world. I could ask it to rework the text to speak to me in analogies or with a more charismatic tone, pulling in modern-day references of New Yorkers in power whose names I may recognize, to bring it closer to home.

This is only one way to remix a book. Consider other remixes too–like turning any book into a graphic novel, a series of listicles, or even TikTok memes that help you remember key ideas. With today’s AI tools, this future isn’t far off.

For those who think this would be a serious offense to book authors who spent years on original content pieces, I'll add that this would be a totally optional way of consuming content (and would ideally involve author consent).

I cant speak for the industry at large, but I'll speak for myself. As a prolific blogger who knows humans can't keep up, I'd be more than happy for people to consume my blog content in different forms that resonate more with them.

2. You design the cadence of how you consume that content.

Split big ideas into daily, weekly, or thematic learning journeys

Any long-form content piece that I discover on the Internet should have a "read it later" button that invites me to receive the information either at a later date, split apart over several days, or woven in with additional content and information.

Think about something complicated, like The Bitcoin Whitepaper, or something long, like the 200-page Developer Report written by Electric Capital each year. Rather than commit to sitting down in one sitting and understanding each concept individually, you could ask an AI to "split it apart" for you and help you learn key themes, at a drip cadence on your own terms.

If I were to break apart the Bitcoin whitepaper, I might invite the AI to teach me one conceptual concept each day, in a way that both teaches the core concepts and also invites in some more common explanations that aren't included in the original source material.

3. Content is alive; it adapts and changes over time.

Imagine books that update, grow, and adapt over time

We've lived most of our lives with the understanding that books are relatively static reading experiences. You read alone, the text is generally fixed. By contrast, blogs are more dynamic and invite reader comments. Consider an AI-powered publishing platform that's even more fluid. At the author's discretion, the source material itself evolves and adapts in real time. A book on "vibe coding with AI, no-code tools" stays fresh as reader comments introduce new tools and the author incorporates the latest technological changes. My book on fractional works has anecdotes that auto-fresh as people who read along share their own stories. The source materials and links can also evolve fresh as new information emerges.

At the risk of rewriting history, it will obviously be important to index all changes onchain, as proof of timestamp for when certain edits and changes were made. But for people like me who want to contribute to an ongoing conversation around key content clusters, I'd love the idea of "starting a book I never finish" online, one that lives and breathes and grows with me and my audience over many years.

One of the reasons I am continuing to publish so much content today is so that I have a lot of play doh to remix it tomorrow. If you've seen any cool content remixing tools out there that I should try for this blog, or other content that I consume online, please let me know.

I'm excited to see how digital publishing evolves in the months and years ahead.