Ebooks and A New Publishing Model

"Our novelettes are the result of a need that the print market cannot satisfy: e-books create a new market for relatively short fiction. I've always liked this form of fiction because it's more difficult than novels. It's a great challenge for a writer. Novels can have pauses, faults: a long story wins by points. A novelette, as Julio Cortazar wrote, needs to win by knock-out.

Our essays, relatively short and strongly focused, are a solution for another functional limit of paper. With digital books you don't need to fill hundreds of pages with the same concept, and you can better filter the information you give to your readers. It's a matter of value: you can transmit a strong concept while requiring a lower investment from the readers in terms of reading time. Time is always valuable—in many cases, more valuable than the price. Nobody can read everything; we have to choose. So if you can explain a complex concept while requiring a manageable time investment, it's a very good thing."


I'm fascinated by the digitization of publishing -- how it affects not just the distribution of content, but the actual form of the content itself. I recently had a chat with Giuseppe Granieri, editorial director of 40 K Books, about new publishing models. To read the entire interview, see my guest post at Jane Friedman's blog There Are No Rules.