CODA: From Pages Read to Minutes Spent

A few months back I wrote about missing a Gary Shteyngart reading which morphed into a discussion of   e-books, author readings and book signings. Publishing Perspectives includes an interesting article about how e-books have changed the nature of the reading experience through the evolution of a key milestone: pages read have now been overtaken by the measure of minutes spent reading.

Todd Sattersten offers the following observations: "Amazon launched Kindle Singles last week. These original works of 10,000 to 30,000 words are designed to fill the space between an essay and book. At the same time, TED, the popular conference organization, launched TED Books as a publishing imprint using the Singles program. Director Chris Anderson stated what he sees as the problem: “Busy people can be daunted at the prospect of having to read a 300- or 400-page book.” Amazon VP Russ Grandinetti suggesting a more elegant reason for this experimental evolution: “Our goal with Singles is to allow compelling ideas to be expressed at their natural length.”


"What Amazon and TED clearly believe is that e-books are going to remove the fear publishers have of needing to deliver specific minimum page count. The variety of screen dimensions across an ever growing number of reading devices and the ability for readers to adjust font size in this new e-world makes the page infinitely variable in size and measuring page count pointless. Each electronic “container” now dictates the form the book will take, much like pouring same amount of water into a champagne flute and saucepan create very different results. So what do we use instead?


"I wonder if the daunting “400 page problem” that Anderson suggests leads us to a better solution. Maybe minutes and seconds is the best measure of book length in the digital world. Music and movies, which migrated to digital formats years ago, consistently provide the duration of the piece and there are already signs of this standard being associated with the written word."

In the earlier piece, DITHOB ruminated on what will become of book signings as an integral part of author readings. Let's take this thought further -- Will digital formats make page counts irrelevant?  Is the best way to quantify reading is through a unit of time ? Will Printed Matter remain a luxury item, like vinyl records?  In our increasingly anti-leisure society, what is the future of "books" as opposed to "literature" and "writing" ? Clearly publishing as a business/industry is making this critical, evolutionary leap. But what will it mean, if "the medium is the message," to readers ?

Full article by Todd Sattersten  here