Request for feedback on the second printing of The Neurobiology of Connection!

Yo. We are now editing the second printing of The Neurobiology of Connection. The first print run sold out about a month ago. The book, as those of you who were kind enough to purchase it discovered, was a whopping 552 pages. While I enjoyed the mass of this, the solidity of the book as an object, and its heft, it was also really expensive to print at this length in full color, which is part of why the price point has been so high. (Also, if you bought the book on Amazon.com, they are greedy in an end-stage capitalism sort of way. Those motherfuckers take a third of the price, when they are neither printing, or shipping the book. Bezos? Go fuck yourself.)

I have an article coming out in August in a publication with a readership in the hundreds of thousands, and so we figured it was a good time to restock, and a good opportunity to make some improvements to the text. There seem to be a couple of places in the first hardcover version where the end of a sentence got covered over by an image, which is mildly horrifying.

This post is open for comments from everyone, not just paid subscribers. If there is any feedback you’d like to give us on the book (if you’ve read it - I’m not looking for feedback from people who haven’t read it ;) we would be most grateful.

I’m especially looking for feedback such as: Gabriel, on page 432, at the bottom, the sentence beginning, “That bloke is a walking exemplar of nostalgia…” is incomplete or covered up. [There is no such sentence, just giving you an example.]

We have reformatted the text: my goal was to get it under 400 pages. This requires that we shrink the font size a bit, and that we are more economical with spacing. We have very slightly reduced the number of illustrations, and also made them a bit smaller. The first printing I was just trying to get the baby into the world; now we want to move a bit closer to perfecting her appearance.

Let me know also if you’ve caught spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and the like. The book went through a series of editors and a proofreader, but no one catches everything.

I would also like to conduct an informal poll: Would you like to see the second printing in hardcover, with the dust jacket that turns into a poster? Or in paperback at a lower price point? (It is going to be less expensive in either case; this is why we are reducing the page count by a third, but I would like to know how much people are into the dust jacket. If the book was $12 cheaper without it, would you want the price reduction?)

Here is an image of the new layout, with the new font size. (I realize this is hard to read in the newsletter, but it should be fine on a 5.5 x 8.5 page.