To millions who have watched him on the Internet or on Oprah Winfrey's TV show, Randy Pausch is the 47-year-old professor dying of cancer who inspired them with his "last lecture," about achieving childhood dreams and living with integrity and joy.

His neighbors in a Virginia suburb know him as the guy biking around the streets for exercise while chattering into a cell-phone headset.

That's what the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor did to expand his 76-minute talk into a book without taking time that he doesn't have away from the people for whom the book was intended: the three children, all under 7, he won't be around to help his wife raise.

"The Last Lecture" is being published by Hyperion, after a bidding war that netted a deal reportedly worth $6.7 million, a figure Pausch won't confirm.

The book is the result of a collaboration with the man listening on the phone to Pausch as he pedaled and talked during 53 long rides, The Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Zaslow, who attended the lecture in September and later wrote about it in his column.

The book goes beyond the lecture, giving Pausch more room to tell his kids what he would have tried to teach them over the next 20 years. He counsels them to have fun, tell the truth, dare to take risks, look for the best in everyone, make time for what matters and always be prepared (explaining that's why he usually carries $200 in his wallet).

"I like the book better than the lecture because I like operational advice," he says during an interview at a coffee shop, where he orders hot water and stirs in hot-chocolate mix from a packet he pulls out of his pocket. He avoids the drinks on the menu as a precaution; surgery to remove parts of several organs has left him lactose-intolerant.

He decided to do the book, at his wife's urging, because thousands of people wrote to him after seeing his lecture, wanting him to know his words helped them or loved ones going through cancer or other tough situations.

"We just felt ... if I can find some way to make lemonade for somebody else out of these lemons, then let's do that," he says.

The 6-foot Pausch is thin — he's dropped from 182 pounds to as low as 138 — with an almost unnervingly direct stare, bushy brows and thick, graying hair.

He found out in September 2006 that he had pancreatic cancer, an especially deadly cancer with few treatment options. Last August, he learned the cancer had spread. Doctors told him he had three to six months live.

He recently suffered heart and kidney failure. He's in pain all the time, and he hasn't been strong enough to ride his bike. He's stopped chemotherapy and spends many days in bed.

He emphasizes that he isn't giving up, and he's doing what he can to "stretch the clock" so maybe he will live long enough to see someone find a cure. His prognosis now is muddier, but "there is no respectable physician in the world who would take an over-under bet that I'll be here past December."

On the advice of experts, he doesn't plan to tell his kids he's dying until he looks and acts sick.

A month after learning the cancer was terminal, Pausch gave his talk, in an auditorium packed with students and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon, where he had co-founded The Entertainment Technology Center and pioneered the nonprofit Alice project, which teaches students computer programming in a 3-D environment.

It's not uncommon for college professors to be asked to ponder what advice they would want to impart if they had to give a last lecture, then deliver that talk. For Pausch, though, it wasn't just an academic exercise.

Pausch talked about achieving his childhood dreams, such as becoming an "Imagineer" who helped develop rides for Disney.

He talked about lessons he learned along the way: show gratitude, don't complain and don't give up when faced by challenges, which he calls "brick walls." He also discusses enabling the dreams of others. He did this, for example, by creating a popular computer science course on building virtual reality worlds.

At the end, Pausch says his talk wasn't for students. It was for his kids.

"The lecture wasn't about dying, it's about living," Pausch says. "The book is the same way. I had no interest in writing about dying."

One of the most touching moments of the lecture came when he had a cake brought in and led the audience in singing "Happy Birthday" to his wife, whose birthday was the day before. Jai Pausch came up from her front-row seat, and the couple embraced.

In the book, Pausch reveals what his wife whispered to him at that moment: "Please don't die."

"Jai wanted that in. She felt that was important," he says, his eyes reddening briefly before he jokes, "What Jai wants, Jai gets."

After he gave the talk, Pausch planned to live out the rest of his life quietly with Jai and their sons Dylan, 6, and Logan, 3, and daughter Chloe, who is almost 2.

Then Zaslow's column appeared, video clips of the speech hit 6 million views on YouTube and other sites — and Pausch became famous.