As part of the deal wherein I mooched the web hosting and support for this online project, I offered to make preparations for publishing it as a book, bound on paper and all that.

That project is now a reality, and you can own The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect in regular book form if you want to.

Note as of January 2014: The offer for autographed copies has closed. Check the fanblog for details.

Back in January 2003 when I made this promise, I anticipated using Book-On-Demand publisher Xlibris.com, but it turned out that their default formatting options were much too restrictive to produce an attractive copy of this book, with its occasional "computer dialogue" passages and simple but important cover art.

The goal for publication (100 people promising to buy a copy) was made around the beginning of March 2003, but even after some exhaustive research I was unable to find a publisher which would allow me to format the book appropriately without spending over a thousand dollars in "setup fees."

I finally decided to approach a couple of agents in a last ditch attempt to get it published "normally." Alas, even the novel's web popularity was not enough to get it over the threshold, and the process was dragging and I wasn't fulfilling a promise I had made to get the thing done.

Meanwhile, Cafepress moved into publishing but perfect binding was at that time still a future option. The Writer's Collective offered very attractive pricing and an interesting guerrilla philosophy, but I would have had to handle orders and shipping myself. Finally, after I had committed to the ultimately wasted months-long stab at getting an agent, I became aware of new startup Lulu.com.

Lulu was started by Red Hat co-founder Rob Young, and it could almost have been created as a response to the original rant about vanity presses that lived at this URL. Lulu allows free formatting; you upload the bulk of the book as a .pdf, the covers as .jpeg, and setup cost is a very appropriate zero. While they fulfill the function of a vanity press they are into other venues like music, art, and teaching materials, and they seem to pursue an aggressive philosophy of not making money unless their content creators do. Their pricing is more attractive than any alternative except the Writer's Collective, and they have a fully functional storefront to handle orders and do shipping.

As of 2013 Prime Intellect is available from Amazon direct and normal booksellers by order, and for Amazon Kindle. If you want a hard copy please order it from Lulu though -- your price is the same, but I get Amazon's cut of it :-)