The New Pamphleteers

E-books are more than a publishing platform—they’re a ­whole new literary form.

From an article in New York Magazine...

Amid all of 2011’s obits for the 300-page object, it’s easy to forget just how limiting the one-size-fits-all template has been for publishing (that one size being about 100,000 words). Why should magazine articles, horror stories for children, and scholarly theses all be molded into one Procrustean bed? The great hidden virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers. It may even be the case that Americans can tolerate serious policy work by academics (like economist Cowen’s e-book hit The Great Stagnation) so long as it isn’t padded out to 500 pages.

From one angle, the short book might look like another manifestation of the shrinking American attention span. From another, it speaks to our longing for a lot more depth than shrinking periodicals can handle.