Good News: it is with an enormous sense of relief that I can announce the book is now available for publication, and can be bought directly from the lulu.com website. Here, finally, is the link you need.

Bad News: if you want a guaranteed copy for Christmas, you need to hop along to Lulu on or before Friday and fork out six quid for postage (the express option).

Other Good News:  the surprisingly expensive postage seems to apply whether you buy one copy or 20.  So why not get a copy for everyone you know?

Here’s a sneak peak at some of the design inside the book:

We took the decision not to include comments or external hyperlinks in the printed book as this added complexity to the project. Hopefully, should this meet our success criteria (ie copies sold > 0) we’ll have a slightly less chaotic route to print in 2009.

We do use the intro to urge people to follow the links to articles on Lib Dem Voice:

The articles themselves, whilst many are of an excellent standard, are not the only writing on the blog, and arguably not the best of the Voice. Our open format encourages comments after every article and a wide range of people use this opportunity to share their views and engage in robust debate. Our editors and contributors are keenly aware that inaccuracies and facile party political posturing will be quickly exposed and tested by the alert readers, drawn from party members and political opponents. Debates raging through hundreds of comments are not unusual, and the best of these are often where the original author stays around and argues the point with all comers. Straw men are demolished and rebuilt from one moment to the next; together we create a living body of work that is far greater than the sum of its parts, and that cannot easily be reduced to black words on white pages fixed for all time.

And if the comments are exciting, so too is the hallowed ground reserved solely for party members in our Forum. We can take debate to a different level, questioning the occasional policy in private and supporting each other as Lib Dems. The Forum provides a space for those geographically isolated activists to come together and share practice without the expense of travel or conference fees.

And one further characteristic of online writing that is hard to reproduce in print is the habit of hyperlinking. Many articles refer to others to bring together a synthesis of thought from theses and antitheses in diverse places across the web. This linking system is the obvious successor to academic citations for the information age. Now it is easier than ever to show your sources inline. It is for this reason we have included a web address for every piece we have published. This allows you to refer to the original article on our website. When you go back to the source of any given article, you will be able to see all the links we have included to other sources, and follow the ensuing debate in the comments. So please, as you peruse this portfolio of pieces, see it not as a static text set in time, but as a launching pad to take you back to a community of commenters and an integrated web of thought spanning continents.

Such purple prose – and all for the bargain price of £5.99. plus surprisingly pricey P&P