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The future of the book trade?
With its snazzy new "Great Ideas" series released this month, Penguin Books hopes to provide an economical remedy for time-pressed readers in search of intellectual sustenance.
Each of the paperbacks costs $8.95 and offers readers a sampling of the world's great non-fiction. For example, the Gibbon book is a slim 92-page selection called The Christians and the Fall of Rome. It presents Gibbon as sort of an intellectual tapas to be savored in one sitting.
Here is the full story. Like it or not, I see the non-fiction sector as heading toward shorter and shorter books. Can you do one hundred pages on monetary policy? Get this:
Because "we want readers to be able to get close to the text," the books do not have introductions or prefaces, Penguin publisher Kathryn Court says. "It's daunting. There are so many books and so little time."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 7, 2005 at 04:09 AM in Books | Permalink
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» "Great Ideas" from Penguin Books from Knowledge Problem
Michael Giberson At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen points to a USA Today story about Penguin Books' new "Great Ideas" series. The books offer extracts, the USA Today story called them "samplings", from great non-fiction. The first twenty books includ... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 7, 2005 10:43:41 AM
» "Great Ideas" from Penguin Books from Knowledge Problem
Michael Giberson At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen points to a USA Today story about Penguin Books' new Great Ideas series. The books offer extracts, the USA Today story called them "samplings", from great non-fiction. The first twenty books include ... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 7, 2005 10:55:43 AM
» Tuesday Afternoon Links from Collected Miscellany
- Who Is Jacqueline Wilson? And should Americans read her? Moira Redmond thinks so: Typically, Wilson's are the type of books that kids like more than their wary parents and teachers do—she is the most-borrowed author in British public libraries... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 11, 2005 4:10:01 PM
Comments
Interesting, considering that the trend in fiction is the opposite. When I was growing up, typical novels (I was an SF reader) went 250-300 pages: a 400 page work was an exception. Nowadays, 400 pages are the minimum: 1000+-page boat anchors (Robert Jordan, anyone?) are not uncommon.
Posted by: David Hecht at Oct 7, 2005 8:55:27 AM
There have been several small books/great ideas series like this over the years in politics, science, cultural subjects and classics of thought. They tend not to work all that well over time, although they sometimes work well for a year or two.
The movement towards shorter books in nonfiction is long established and it is now taken for granted in trade publishing. The term "a good airplane read," after all, harkens back to the 1980s. You'll very often hear trade editors asking the question "How much do I want to read about this anyway?" They know that book buyers generally weigh their investment of time more carefully than their investment of money in considering whether to buy a book.
What may surprise you is how actively the university presses are getting on the bandwagon, although for reasons of direct cost as much as market appeal. The effects are going to be far greater in scholarly publishing than they were in trade publishing, where authors for the most part have complied with or even embraced the trend. Most of them don't have much choice if they want to attract a publisher. But scholars, particularly in the humanities, are having a very hard time coming to terms with the increasing demand that they write shorter books. Ah, the stories that could be told....
Posted by: pblsh at Oct 7, 2005 9:09:36 AM
I think this is an excellent idea. Having read significant sections of
Gibbon's work, I think it is fair to say that there is plenty of material
in that work that is not absolutely necessary to read to understand the
main points of his thesis. Having a scholar(I am sure Penguin has employed
an individual who is well qualified to judge what the key sections are)
edit a classic work down to key sections is a great way to expose folks to
classic literature and research.
The vocabulary, grammar, and allusions of classic works are going to be
difficult for a modern reader without intense study. Reframing such works
to make them more accessible to us is an excellent goal.
Posted by: Scott Peterson at Oct 7, 2005 9:48:09 AM
Tyler asks, "Can you do one hundred pages on monetary policy?"
I don't know about monetary policy, but I tend to believe that most "think" books (as opposed to purely informational books, such as biographies and histories) could be just as good, if not better, at 150 pages or less.
Posted by: John P. at Oct 7, 2005 11:41:44 AM
Maybe the huge success of Freakonomics has gotten more publishers interested in short works of nonfiction.
Posted by: Peter at Oct 7, 2005 1:10:34 PM
I'm somewhat astonished to find The Prince on the list. At about 100 pages, isn't it short enough already? Yes, there are sections on old Italian statesmen that many of us can do without, but they can be easily skipped over.
Posted by: Robert at Oct 7, 2005 3:53:34 PM
Next up: Moby-Dick without the descriptions of whale anatomy, Dickens without the descriptions of the streets of London, and other improvements to fiction.
Posted by: Ken Houghton at Oct 7, 2005 5:05:31 PM
Friedman's book on the flat world was a good 250 page book stretched way too far, do book houses still have editors?
I'm a natural speed reader and I cannot come close to keeping up with everything I want to read. Altogether now, let's write something CONCISE.
Posted by: save_the_rustbelt at Oct 8, 2005 6:20:49 PM
The best books are short.
How much to write is extremely difficult to pinpoint; any experimentation is welcome.
Posted by: Jason at Oct 11, 2005 10:50:22 AM
I'm strongly in favour of this.
Over the last 20 years I've watched computer books grow from a narrow technical market into a mass market item, and one of the unfortunate side effects - at least as I see it - is the death of the small book. Perceived calue for money seems to have driven books up to a standard 'phone-book' size, with consequent rise of padding.
Add to that the number of fairly interesting non-fiction books I've finished recently and thought "that would have made an excellent 20 page New Yorker article" (Freakonomics is a case in point) and I wish Penguin the best of luck.
Posted by: Steve Taylor at Oct 13, 2005 8:00:32 PM
I used to be strongly against abridged editions, until I read an unabridged copy of _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. You will not be surprised to hear that the Disney movie (which I had seen first; only reading longer books means you get to fewer of them over time) was sanitized. I was surprised by the chapter on the geography of Paris, and now am greatly in favor of good abridgements.
Posted by: Tom at Oct 13, 2005 11:45:58 PM
I don't know about monetary policy, but I tend to believe that most "think" books (as opposed to purely informational books, such as biographies and histories) could be just as good, if not better, at 150 pages or less.
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