The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Conversation

Why I Decided to Self-Publish and Embraced a Different Kind of Academic Freedom

I recently self-published The Ghost in the Machine in Your Classroom, a collection of essays originally shared on my Augmented Educator Substack that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and education. This past Saturday, I also began serializing a more traditional work, The Detection Deception, on the same platform, which I plan to self-publish as well. By choosing self-publishing over established publishers for both projects, I've deliberately departed from academic convention, forgoing the path that has long been essential for building an academic career.

The short story behind this decision sounds almost mundane: I wanted to retain complete control over the publishing rights. But the long story is, as always, significantly more complicated and far more revealing about the seismic shifts occurring in how we create, share, and value creative work in the age of artificial intelligence.

At the heart of this decision lies something I've been exploring extensively here: the fundamental transformation of value from product to process in the AI era. This shift requires us to completely reimagine the purpose of our creative end products. Once you understand this transformation, the choice to self-publish becomes not just logical, but essential. It's about recognizing that the ability to build and nurture a community of engaged readers who care about your ongoing intellectual journey matters more than university press imprints, peer review processes, or library sales.