How's About a Quickie? Paper and Digital Consort to Spawn Instant Books

A decade ago as I was reviewing a standard trade book contract I had a dark and scary thought. There was nothing in it requiring the publisher to issue the work originally as a printed book. I then examined the contracts of other major publishers. Same thing. Subsequently, in contract negotiations, I began asking publishers to guarantee that they would not publish books as e-book originals. "We are book publishers," they assured me with a sniff. "We would never do that." But they refused to put that assurance in writing.

And that is why you never say never. Motoko Rich reports in the New York Times that, faced with the exigencies of getting timely books out fast, major publishers have begun issuing them in e-book format before they release them in print. And in some cases they don't release them in print at all.

For instance, about a month after the manuscript was turned in, the FT (Financial Times) Press released Barack, Inc: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign. The format of choice? E-Book. Same goes for Daniel Gross's Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. That one, Rich reports, took just three weeks from completion to release.

Though there's nothing improper about first publishing quickie books in e-format, until now the practice was unprecedented among major book publishers. How do they justify the change in course? On the grounds that today's frenetic and unrelenting news cycle requires nothing less than instantaneous issuance of books. Though it can be argued that the proper media for fast-breaking stories are newspapers, television or the Internet, no one would quarrel with FT Press's Amy Neidlinger when she tells Rich that, “People can’t wait a year to get timely information on critical subjects. Especially today it’s dated 10 minutes after you’ve just received the first installation.” Or with literary agent Todd Shuster, who says that even significant books, if they “come out so late that they’re either obsolete or redundant, are going to lose out.”

Granted. We'll even grant that simultaneous publication of e-book and the print version makes sense for books requiring immediate dissemination. But original e-book publication by traditional publishers places their feet on a slippery slope. For one thing, there may be no legal basis for it; that is, no contractual provision sanctioning it. For another, authors who bargain for print publication and end up with e-book release may feel they have not been dealt with in good faith. For yet another, the current state of the e-book business is such that e-book publication does not earn a fraction of the revenue that print does, either for publisher or author. And finally, there may be e-book publishers that can simply do a better job because they are not burdened with the slow and cumbersome publication machinery and procedures of large houses, nor are they hampered by considerations requiring them to charge artificially high retail prices.

In short, we have to wonder whether original e-book publication is the proper province of conventional publishing companies.

Speaking of quickies...

Arguably the first instant book in modern history was First American Into Space by Robert Silverberg. It was published in 1961, when "instant" was measured in months and not moments.

The story of its creation is an entertaining one. After plans were set to send the first American astronaut into space, Charles Heckelmann, editor of a paperback publisher called Monarch Books, devised a plan to publish a book to celebrate the event. He hired Robert Silverberg, a reliable paperback novelist who has long since gone on to fame, fortune and honor, to write it. Filling - some would say padding - his manuscript with the history of rocketry, astronaut training, biographies of the astronaut candidates for the flight, etc. etc. Silverberg delivered everything but the last chapter. The book was set into type and while Alan Shepard rode a capsule for fifteen minutes before parachuting back to Earth, Silverberg typed the final chapter, taking it right off the television set in real time. He rushed the chapter to Heckelmann who in turn rushed it to the printer. "The flight was on a Friday," Silverberg reminisces, "and I seem to recall they had the book on sale by the following Monday or Tuesday."

Three or four days to produce and release a book? That now seems like an eternity.

Richard Curtis