Attention spans are short. E-readers are plentiful. Digital delivery is fast and convenient. How can university presses turn those facts to their advantage and attract readers who want bite-sized morsels of content?
Princeton University Press is about to test one approach with a new, e-only series. Called Princeton Shorts, it debuts November 9.
Unlike Amazon’s Kindle Singles, the Princeton series won’t have new material. It takes excerpts of books from Princeton’s back list and packages them as e-books. They run from 20 to 100 pages and will cost from 99 cents to $4.99. They’re selections, not abridgments, and come with new titles. Princeton Shorts will be available via Kindle and Google Books but not through the iBookstore, because the press isn’t yet selling books through that channel. (iPad users will be able to read them using the Kindle app.)
The first batch—five titles—is eclectic. There’s The Second Great Contraction, an excerpt from a recent best-seller, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, and one from Kenneth S. Deffeyes’s Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. There are classics: Thoreau’s Walden and Clausewitz’s On War. My favorite is The Five Habits of Highly Effective Honeybees (and What We Can Learn From Them), an excerpt from Thomas D. Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy. It promises to reveal “how honeybees work together to make important decisions for the hive.”
The press originally thought it would try new content for Princeton Shorts but changed its mind when Amazon announced Kindle Singles, according to Robert Tempio, who oversees the series. Mr. Tempio is the press’s executive editor in charge of philosophy, political theory, and the ancient world. “Our thinking was that with the emergence of the e-book, there might be new and additional opportunities to promote and sell particularly pertinent and/or edifying selections from our books.”
I asked him whether he’s concerned that readers will skip buying an entire book if they can download a good chunk of it for a few bucks. “There was more sense that this might drive people to the full book,” Mr. Tempio said. In any case, the outlay in time and money isn’t likely to be burdensome for the press.
Mr. Tempio pointed to an earlier, predigital-era Princeton book as an inspiration (and maybe as reassurance): A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960 by Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, published in 1963. “It was an instant classic,” he said. One chapter on the Great Depression caught on with economists and, in 1965, the press issued it as a stand-alone book, The Great Contraction. Both “continued to sell very well,” Mr. Tempio said.
The Princeton Shorts experiment won’t transform scholarly publishing as we know it. But it looks like a sensible, efficient way to test digital delivery, gauge readers’ appetites for short books, and make the most of already published content. Maybe there’s an untapped course-adoption market for some of this material.
Other presses will no doubt track the experiment to see how it works. Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, called it “good, savvy publishing on Princeton’s part.” In an e-mail, he said he was “interested to hear what happens—particularly if the market for the ‘shorts’ turns out to be more classroom than general trade.”
It’s occurred to other publishers that a Kindle Singles-like model is worth investigating. “I’d be surprised if many were not thinking along these lines,” said Garrett P. Kiely, director of the University of Chicago Press.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Chicago press has been looking into e-shorts with original content. Part of the business and editorial calculation, Mr. Kiely said, is for a publisher to figure out what it hopes to gain from such a project. As he said, “Are you trying to make money on it or get attention?”
The Princeton Shorts series, although not radical in itself, shows that the mainstream shift in how publishers and readers behave has worked its way into the university-press world. Mr. Kiely told me that authors and content creators he works with have gotten a lot more interested lately in new ways of presenting material. That “has sparked a change in how we think about things,” he said.
Faced with a marketplace that now includes e-shorts and book apps, presses have the chance to find new outlets for what they publish.
“If they have the rights to parse up the content in some way, presenting it in a more consumer-friendly fashion, it’s certainly worth trying it and seeing what you can get out of it, if only to get a better understanding of the market we have now,” Mr. Kiely said.