One reason academic publishing is broken is that we’re all suffering from a publishing disorder. We demand that scholars produce more than is healthy for any of us, and that leads to research that is thinly-sliced into least publishable units and books that nobody wanted to write, much less read. We have turned university presses and commercial publishers into our promotion and tenure committees, and it’s unsustainable in so many ways.

Why are books so hard to market? Is it possible that the main stumbling block to purchase, (and to consumption), is the sheer amount of time required to read them?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that the average book is 80,000 to 100,000 words long and requires six hours of fairly sustained attention from the customer.

In some situations that will be precisely why the purchase is made, because the customer has ‘time to kill’ on a beach holiday or a long journey, in a sickbed – whatever. Sometimes the pure beauty of the author’s prose and the languor of the storytelling is the reason why that title or that author has been selected. But what if the motive to purchase is that the reader merely wants the information contained in the book and wants it as quickly and painlessly as possible?

Am I the only person who has seen a book that they really want to read in the shops, or read a review, and then simply failed to find the time to read it – or at least failed to get beyond half way? Most people have a colossal number of calls upon their time once they have put in the hours required to earn a living, bring up their family or clip their toe-nails. Given a choice between a quick flick through a newspaper with a cup of tea, an hour in front of the television with their supper, or consuming one sixth of a difficult book, how often does the poor consumer give in to one of the easier options?

So many books could do with severe editing to remove extraneous material, repetitions and all the rest – “kill your darlings” as any creative writing tutor will tell you – but if the final manuscript then comes in at 30,000 words, or less than a hundred pages, it will not look like good value for money, and the publishers will have another marketing hurdle to overcome.

It seems likely that the printed book will never escape from this trap, any more than the average sit-com will escape the half-hour format or many feature films will be allowed come in at less than ninety minutes. The audiences have historical expectations of the formats which cannot be lightly dismissed.

But if electronic books take off, might we see something altogether different evolving? If people can’t see how ‘thick’ the book is when they buy it, might they be less daunted by the long ones and less likely to dismiss the short ones? Might publishers then be able to stop buying writing by the pound?

There are the warmed-over dissertations that could have stayed perfectly well in that form, if we had a good mechanism for distributing them. The books made up of 8 chapters, 4 of which were “previously published,” two of which serve as intro and conclusion and the other two of which could have been skipped. Then of course the books that are really just articles padded out and mercilessly elaborated upon.

The tenure process doesn’t help, of course.

In my field the book was a fairly rare commodity until a few decades ago. Many influential articles were written, at tens of pages of length, and the authors are no less the well known for it.

No, we could use a little restraint.

Μεγα βιβλιον, μεγα κακον.

The kindle does show the position in terms of ‘Locations’, and shows the last/highest location #, which gives you an idea of the length of the book. The free samples from Amazon tend to be a few hundred ‘locations’. The longer books I have are over 15,000 locations. So if you buy a book and its last location is around 3,000, it’s not very long.
(My kindle version of “The Crimson Petal And The White’ is 15,000 locations. Amazon says the hardcover is 848 pages.)

Actually, we’re already seeing experiments in different lengths of media. Youtube revived the one reeler, and the how to sites are full of videos that run long enough to show how to, then roll the credits. It’s even revived the newsreel.

In music, digital delivery brought back the single, but that trend was underway before. Vinyl 45 singles started showing up in the early 90s. If you think a lot of books are full of filler, read a music blog about the filler ratio of most albums.

In text, we’ve not only seen a return of letter writing and epistolary novels, but also more variation in length. There are a lot more essays, and they aren’t all driven by word count. I tend to read non-fiction and public domain fiction online only because I don’t have a good supply of online fiction yet.

In every case there was a format dictated by the physical medium, and as that constraint has relaxed, we’re seeing new form factors. The problem we have is that the various businesses are behind the curve. Just as developers have trouble developing mixed use projects because they are unfamiliar, publishers are having trouble offering new products.

First, there is the issue of peer review. While you might not agree with, like, or have any respect for the conclusions of authors of academic journal papers/books you read, people who are almost always more expert than you have thought these works sufficiently meritorious to approve their publication. This instantly lends them a sheen of professional credibility lacking in almost all popular non-fiction. Their contribution might be marginal or overwrought, but the mechanism that checks their quality is not merely based on sales or popularity. Of course, while this by no means guarantees that every piece of academic writing is stellar, if the widespread cultivation of expertise is important to you, the institution of peer-review should be as well.

Second, tons of journals exist because there are tons of professors or aspiring professors who make their living primarily from an institution sponsoring their research and expecting them to publish. There are few ways of evaluating the quality of professors’ research outside of publication (which, again, shows expert authorization of the findings of the piece) – this, in turn, while driving absolute numbers of publication up, also allows us to both saturate the intellectual terrain with new research and fairly easily rank contributions through the inevitable stratification of journals through status reputation. While nearly all of these contributions may be irrelevant or uninteresting to you (as well as, of course, being of uneven quality), because they are part of the larger academic project of growing human knowledge in a relatively institutionally defined way, they are probably useful to someone. Moreover, because only some journals are at the top of any discipline, it is easy to tell what is “important” for general disciplinary knowledge in addition being able to easily identify the more specialized contributions of use to a much smaller pool of readers. Despite it’s dysfunctions, I think it’s a pretty great system, actually.

Good point – but I’d say it’s more likely to lead to the possibility of longer ones, which can be watched in convenient chunks at home (aka: miniseries) rather than having to be the optimum length for cinema showing.
You could also refer to the constraint of the 3-minute vinyl single…

I think what we may see when this “revolution” in the publishing industry calms down is that e-content will take advantage of a more interactive way of presenting information—through video, interactive graphics etc.—while traditional books will (as you say) be coveted as beautiful, constantly thumbed-through avenues for mental exploration . That’s the nature of information versus understanding, surely? Sometimes we need quick, instantly “grabbable” information and at other times we want (I hope!) to take time with a book that provokes us to reflect on how we view the world and consider new ways of thinking, behaving, and being.

I have worked with Caro’s researcher in the recent past and suspect most of us will be alive.

Also, in that small subsection of the publishing world where the author gets a substantial advance, the temptation to let the book grow longer than it should be is nearly irresistible—because a bigger (fatter) book commands a higher price, and potentially a greater profit.

Obviously, there are writers of all sorts who turn in manuscripts that are nearly ready for the printer. But the number is small, and the proportion dropping as the total number of published books swells.

P.S. In defense of Mike Kinsley, his real achievement was as an editor at The New Republic. He found new writers, pushed them hard, and put out what was then, thirty years ago, the best magazine in the country. (The back of the magazine has always been under separate direction, with wildly inconsistent results.)

P.P.S. EK should stop waiting for the last word on Lyndon Johnson and re-read The Power Broker. He might learn something useful about the limits of liberal hubris.

I’m reading Peter Wilson’s new book on the 30 Years War, and while I’m sure someone on Amazon has complained that it’s too long, it’s not like there’s filler. There’s just a damn lot to talk about.