Mark Twain famously wrote "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one." A major difference between a restoration thread and a book is the former is composed and posted in pieces, typically describing the work that was completed that same day, while a book benefits from having had months for many revisions before the manuscript is ready for someone else to even look at, let alone ready to publish.You should not discount the MPH route ... quality is the watchword not quantity My book the Vincent Black Shadow was far longer before I had to pull it back to the publishers size requirement and is I think the better for it
My Ariel restoration thread is 109,794 words long, which 2-3x longer than your book. But, as you and Mark Twain would understand, it would take a long time to convert that quantity of words into the smaller number of quality ones needed for a book. Anyway, I'll be writing a restoration thread in real time as I work on the bike, not a book, so each post won't be of the quality of a similar-length excerpt from a book. Neither will it have the quality of something I might write for MPH, since in that case I would have an entire month to write and edit each piece before submitting it.
So, if a restoration thread won't have the quality of a book, or even of a monthly MPH article, what good is it? I'm glad you asked. Bill Hoddinott's interview of Graham Smith in the September MPH is one of the longer articles in that issue, consisting of ~3000 words and three small photographs. Although the photos are in color, B&W seems to be the norm for MPH. Anyway, at that rate it would take three years to print the words in my Ariel thread, and at least a few more to print the images in relatively small size, whereas they are large, in much greater quantity, and in color, on the web. Also, MPH is monthly so it lacks the immediacy of content available on-line. I might submit an article in which I wrote that I was about to do something a certain way, a month later it would appear in MPH, a month after that someone could explain in a letter to MPH why I should do it differently, and a month after that I would explain what I had already done four months earlier. In contrast, feedback on the web can come in a few hours, if not a few minutes.
More than once in my other restoration threads I've been uncertain which of several possible solutions I should attempt, so I've stopped for the day and posted my progress. The typical result of this is at least a few people post their ideas on how I should proceed. Even if I ended up not taking any of their suggestions, almost always the input was invaluable in helping me frame my thinking. As I said, this has happened more than once. And, it's very much like the responses to this thread, which are helping frame my thinking on how to proceed once I finish my current projects and (re)start my Black Shadow restoration .