When will we evolve past “books”?
By Joe Wikert
As I browsed the latest Kindle bestsellers to decide if anything was worth purchasing I found myself asking this question over and over: Does the author really need 300 pages to explain this concept? I can’t tell you how many times I finished a book and felt frustrated that the 3 or 4 key learnings I came away with could have easily been boiled down to a few pages.
Part of the problem is the physical presence a publisher (as well as author and bookseller) feels a book needs to have on the shelf. Imagine a book like Freakonomics as a 40-page work instead of a 336-page one. I read that one though, and despite the fact that’s it’s a terrific book, the authors easily could have condensed it down to about one-tenth its length.
You might say that a good book is all about storytelling and I don’t completely disagree. Freakonomics is loaded with great stories, btw, but a 40-page version would have been just as effective at conveying the key points. And frankly, most lengthy business books don’t have much of an engaging story to tell at all; the authors just go on and on, seemingly in an effort to puff things up to 300 pages or so.
A 40-page version of Freakonomics would be lost on the shelves. Couple that with the theory that no one is willing to spend $25 or $30 on a “business book” and you now know two of the key reasons why these things all have very similar form factors.
That’s how the market has operated up to now, but how will it work in the future? The more we move from print to e-books the less important something like spine width becomes. There’s no shelf to have a physical presence on, so why force every business book to be 300-400 pages?
How about the price? Would you pay $25 for something you could read in well under an hour? I would, especially if it delivers all the knowledge that’s so diluted across the 300-400 pages we have to read through now.
I can see a model where the typical work is longer than a magazine article but much shorter than a book. In fact, I think that’s the sweet spot for the future. A magazine article (2-3 pages) typically doesn’t allow for enough space to adequately cover many of the topics you find in business books today, but I’ll bet 30 or 40 pages would do the trick, and many authors might not need that much space.
So what will we call these products? A new name is required. They’re not books and they’re not articles. There’s no elegant way to splice those two words together so I think we’ll have to come up with something brand new. In the mean time, I very much look forward to the day when these new products dominate the market and we’re no longer forced to read 300 pages to gain 30 pages of insight. I know I’ll read much more in that world. How about you?
P.S. — I realize this model doesn’t work for all types of books. For example, fiction is definitely all about storytelling and doesn’t apply. Then there’s the world of how-to books. I’d argue this model isn’t ideal there either. In fact, I believe a totally different e-model will evolve there over time, one without boundaries and something that takes us in a totally different direction…but that deserves its own separate blog post, so stay tuned for more…
Editor’s note: this article is reprinted, with permission, from Joe’s Publishing 2020 Blog. PB
May 11th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
I agree completely. It’s ages now I’ve believed that 90% of the popular nonfiction titles could get their message across with a 50-page pamphlet just as well. The other 10% need a lot of supporting citations to prove a contentious theory.
Fiction? Well, it’s true that may publishers have their Procrustean beds for the type of tales they publish, and some of these are limited to within the nearest few thousand words. All for the sake of meeting a standard number of pages in the house style of font and text size. Here too, the horizonless nature of etexts could lead to shorter novels — or longer ones. (Sometimes there is something gained when a writer has to meet a word limit that is less than he’d wish for.)
May 11th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Why choose? How about actually using, oh, say … hypertext? You remember that. It’s the ht in http, right?
A 50 page book, with 250 pages of well written appendices containing more explanation and discussion of the specific issues is what hypertext was invented for. The fact that no one publishes ebooks like that is an unexploited opportunity. IIRC, hypertext was originally intended for stand-alone applications, not for networks. Maybe the past intent is the future.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
May 11th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Great comment, Jack!
I agree with Joe’s point, which is why I’ve published quite a few “e-articles” at the Kindle store. You don’t need a whole book to address issues like point of view in fiction, how to write dialogue, and how to get your self-published book into the trade.
May 11th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
A book (or an ebook) is a saleable unit. And up until recently, we thought in terms of books which were sold at bookstores, requiring a certain minimum length (and price). Now, with ebooks and amazon, many of these requirements have changed. That is good, and I think the result is good both for readers and authors. Readers will be more willing to pay small books for a couple of books, and authors will willing to write smaller books. That’s a win-win.
May 11th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I’m not so sure that shorter is better. Overall, there is a nasty trend in written works for brevity and simplification almost to the point as if the authors expects the short attention spans from readers. Are we becoming an ADD nation?
I listened to the unabridged audio of Freakonomics a few years ago and don’t recall ever thinking it over long; if anything, I thought it was kind of brief. Admittedly, I don’t normally read business books; I prefer history, biography, or science for my non-fiction reading and as a rule I don’t find those would require a condensed version either.
A good author should know the subject well enough to realize if it should be written as a magazine article or a book. Now not all published authors are going to be good authors, or even know the subject well, but I would put a stake in the claim that some readers may not be able to focus long enough to get through a whole book.
May 11th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I agree with Greg M. Long, slow books are a pleasure all their own. I thought that Freakonomics was excellent at its length — and it wasn’t even all that long. I don’t like this call for shorter, shorter, shorter. Read a magazine if you want to. For those who want deeper insights, fleshed-out ideas, and supported arguments, it’s books, books, books all the way.
May 11th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Ebooks will mean a resurgence in shorter forms (stories, poems). That does not necessarily mean that consumers will pay for individual stories or smaller collections. They still expect a reasonable size of short stories (10-20).
Speaking of freakonomics, I read that entire book in Borders in less than an hour. I couldn’t believe how fluffy it was. (I had already read the NYT story upon which the book was based). The subject was interesting and well-written, but it was not a book. The Freakonomics blog, on the other hand, seems much more substantial.
May 11th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
The word you’re looking for is “mook.” Book content bound in a magazine format (also defined as a “manga book”). The mook is a well-established publishing format in Japan. It’s the ideal “dead trees” medium for novella-length fiction and “hot off the presses” reportage and analysis that demands more depth than a magazine article. The mook is also a simple, low-cost way to compile material from specialty magazines, such as cookbooks. “Mook” (mukku) is a searchable category on Amazon-Japan.
May 11th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
@Greg M.:
That would be the trend that followed the previous trend in fiction for multi-book sets of wrist-rupturing megabooks? As opposed to the prior tendency for short, spare books. Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light”, copyright 1967, is (going and looking) is 257 pages. Not exactly long by any standards. Styles change … meh.
The key is to have information arranged to the best advantage of the reader. If hypertext linking is the best tool, so be it. If comprehensive indices, good tables of contents, and copious, erudite footnoting is useful, those should be there, too. Long or short prose not really a critical issue, so long as the subject is covered to the reader’s satisfaction.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
May 11th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Completely agreed. I felt like half of my fiction workshop this semester was spent theorizing on the most “sellable” lengths of stories. Either cut something down to a manageable 20 pages or bump it way up to a novel. Publicists send me books to review for my blog; tons of them could’ve been cut by half and greatly improved. A few, on the other hand, could have been expanded. The length should fit the requirements of the art and the intention, not the publisher’s profit margins.
May 11th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
The new word you’re looking for is “text”, a concept of any collection of words in a coherent form.
I do hope that eBooks will finally free the text from its “binding” form. Any text, fictional or non-fictional should be just as long as necessary to deliver the message.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
I understand that some non-fiction books are written with fluff to boost the length, however, I believe that these sorts of books are in the minority. The fact is that the 200-300 page book is written on a subject that probably could be distilled down to only forty pages, but instead, to build a better argument for their thesis, they use 200-300 pages to ground their thesis in evidence in order to prove its validity. If we start only making 20-40 page arguments we lose the vigorous research that is supposed to (but doesn’t always make it into) go into writing a book and making an effective argument. So, nonfiction books can seem like they’re repeating themselves when in reality the author has written their thesis out using different angles, forms of logic, and evidence to convince a wide variety of readers that what they are saying has validity and merit. \
May 12th, 2009 at 1:26 am
During my long career as a computer trainer I frequently found myself trying to explain to administrators (and sometimes students!) that a computer training manual of 300 pages was not necessarily better than one of 10 pages which actually contained the material they needed to know.
In my later career as a book indexer I often find myself having to read and index material that has come up once, twice, or three times before in the same book. Textbooks are particularly bad in this respect: there seems to be a feeling that they must be crammed full of pages in order to justify their exorbitant prices.
Unfortunately as a book gets bigger and more and more people get involved in it, the chance of duplication increases exponentially. Also at fault is the use of word processing technology, which makes it easier to copy and modify text than to rewrite it.
May 12th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Finally authors will be able to write texts of a length appropriate to their subject. Authors won’t have to fluff novels or trim them ruthlessly. Shorts stories and novellas can be written again. Non-fiction can be condensed or expanded as need, could even be published in abridged and expanded versions simultaneously.
May 12th, 2009 at 3:10 am
Also, I think the term “text” works best, and it can be modified by adjectives: long, short, etc.
May 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Most real scientific discoveries is published as 30-40 pages articles and mainly circulated online via jstor and similar services and completely ignored by just about averybody especially those with money invested In some kind of ebook business.
theres some really interesting mechanism going on here, because for a lot of cases people are moving away from dead tree editions and 25+ pages dont seams to be a real issue to read.(thats what a small slashdot.org tread looks like in print) im seign 50+ manuals circulated as word or pdf files but all of this is somehow branded as not relevant when examining ebook
This mechanism will insure that nothing but the pure 1:1 transition to ebook devices having no real similarities with computers will ever ber considered a part of a move away from paperbased books.
May 12th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
I’m not so sure shorter “doesn’t apply” to fiction — I’ve read some awfully bloated books in the last couple of years that could EASILY have been made into stand-alone novellas and been wonderful, wonderful works. As it was, they just went on and on and on, and I found myself getting BORED…..
Mostly, what I think it boils down to is that authors need to have the freedom to tell the story in the length it needs to be told in, regardless of publishing mores. Be it short, medium, or long, fiction or non-fiction.
May 18th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Yes, some books are for pleasure and the length, wording, phrasing and poetics in the writing are worth the time. It isn’t too much fun to take a kindle-like devise into a bath or hammock or sunny beach. Aren’t we all just thrilled that we have the freedom in this country to write what we choose as well as a fabulous selection of reading materials…Bookazine? How is that for a name?