We'll concede that former Valleywag Nick Douglas is, in our limited experience, among the wittiest Twitter users out there, and an entertaining chronicler of internet culture. But, really, $50,000 for his book of re-tweets?

That's what our New York publishing source tells us Douglas netted as an advance from his publisher, HarperCollins, for TwitterWit, his collection of other people's microblogging posts. Though he's not writing much original content for the project, Douglas assured us that slogging through submissions — want your tweets to LIVE FOREVER? click here — was pretty, uh, draining, "like watching five hours of porn: your sense of humor dies halfway through."

Still, if we'd known repurposing other people's content, whether on Twitter, Tumblr, Tumblr or Tumblr, was a fast track to literally tens of thousands of dollars in publishing money, we'd have jumped on that trend sooner.

As opposed to what we're doing now, which is, uh, totally different.

(Top pic via Nick Douglas)