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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Books Today in Good Book Ideas

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 1:21 PM

Say what you will about Tina Brown—She destroyed the New Yorker! She saved the New Yorker!—and say what you will about her Huffington Post challenger the Daily Beast . I think this is a really great idea for magazines and books and publishing media in general:

Beast Books—as it's being called—will crank its books out in a shorter period of time to capitalize on people's shorter interests in a topic. As opposed to big blow-out books that run three hundred pages and take over a year to report, write, and edit, these will be only be around 150 pages. Think of them as really long magazine stories.

The books will first be published as e-books and then as "real" books. The long delay between writing and publication has been killing publishing for a decade now, and short, crappy magazine writing has been killing magazines for about the same amount of time. I think the idea of a quickly-published novella-length magazine story is a really great, promising idea.

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That's kind of hilarious from a gal who reduced the length of the articles she'd publish in The New Yorker precipitously. I'm not sure that the world really needs more books churned out instantly. Just because some people's attention spans are shorter doesn't mean that short attention spans should be catered to more, at least not in books. Why is it better to make books more like magazines (or more like blogs)? They will always fail at that task.

Posted by Fnarf

on September 29, 2009 at 1:38 PM

Shorter books! Less research! Pandering to ADD!

You should be fired.

Posted by trstr on September 29, 2009 at 3:03 PM

Oh, @2. You ignore the fact that I promote the Beast Books as a cure for short magazine articles. Isn't there a way to meet in the middle? I wrote about how much I loved, for instance, Cullen's intensely researched book on Columbine that came out this year. But not every subject needs a 400-page book. Some subjects deserve a fast, novella-length piece of reportage, so that the book can be part of the dialogue rather than a tombstone on top of the dialogue. I'm in favor of all different sizes and types of books.

Posted by Paul Constant

on September 30, 2009 at 12:19 AM

I agree with Paul. There's no law I know of that says a nonfiction book has to be at least 350 pages to be taken seriously.

Posted by Greg on September 30, 2009 at 8:28 AM

I'm for it. Lots of good stuff might get read (the New Yorker article about McAllen, TX, health care costs) if sold as a fairly priced little pamphlet. Folks might be more likely to pick it up, too, if it's not so huge.

I love long magazine pieces. But I've got plenty of time/no life. And here I am on slog again...

Posted by CP on October 1, 2009 at 6:38 PM