TL;DR: Pre-order What We Owe The Future to help the book reach more people.

Once you pre-order, fill out this form to get a chance to meet with Will over Zoom to discuss the book!

🇺🇸 US

🇬🇧 UK

🌏  Elsewhere: use any regional online bookstore (eg. your country’s Amazon)

📚 About What We Owe The Future

What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill comes out on August 16th in the US and September 1st in the UK. It is about longtermism — the view that positively impacting the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. A description of the book is below:

We live at a pivotal time. Humanity’s written history spans only five thousand years. Our yet-unwritten future could last for millions more – or it could end tomorrow. Staggering numbers of people will lead lives of flourishing or misery, or never live at all, depending on what we do today. The fate of the world is in our hands.

In What We Owe the Future*, philosopher William MacAskill argues for a perspective he calls longtermism: that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. From this perspective, it’s not enough merely to undo climate change or avert the next pandemic. We must ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; prevent the end of moral progress; and prepare for a world where the smartest beings on the planet are digital, not human.*

By acting wisely, we can put humanity on the right course. And if we do, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will look back and thank us, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world of justice, hope and beauty.

❓FAQs

Why does pre-ordering help What We Owe The Future reach more people?

• Pre-ordering the hardcover helps the book reach bestsellers lists:
  • Pre-orders count as first week sales in the eyes of many bestseller lists, so if we drive a lot of pre-orders now, What We Owe The Future will be much more likely to hit the bestseller list in the first week.
  • This matters because (a) many people look to bestseller lists to guide which books they buy, and (b) being on the list also leads to more press opportunities. It’s hard to know the exact effect of this, but one 2004 study found that appearing on The New York Times’s Best-Seller list increased first-time authors’ sales by 57 percent, and on average, for a book’s first year on shelves, it increased sales by 13 or 14 percent.
• Signaling that the book is important to major booksellers:
  • Early pre-orders signal to major booksellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) that the book is popular, which can lead them to (a) order more of the book and (b) market the book more prominently on their websites and in their bookstores. With few pre-orders, booksellers might think that What We Owe The Future won’t sell more than the typical philosophy book.
  • Booksellers may also be more likely to partner with us for discounts and giveaways, since they will have a lot of the book in stock that they’ll want to sell.
  • When booksellers buy more of the book, it also makes it less likely that they will run out of stock. This sadly happened with Superintelligence. Amazon ran out of stock earlier on, which sapped some of the momentum for sales.