Does digital size matter?

I share my buddy Steve Weddle's skepticism about whether eReaders are going to save publishing.

Sure, they might kill the used book market and temporarily increase sales. Maybe those Kindle and Nook and iPad buyers will keep buying books at higher than normal rate for a few years until they realize they're never going to get around to reading those 30 books they bought back when their toy was shiny and new.

But are eReaders going to create new audiences? Are people really going to read books on a screen when they wouldn't read on that icky, yucky paper stuff?

Not a chance.

I do think, though, that eReaders may impact the length of creative works.


The guideline of 80-110,000 words (or thereabouts) for a first novel is tied to the economics of book printing rather a scientifically derived formula for how long readers will put up with a story. Giant tomes like Infinite Jest or slim volumes like Bridges of Madison County were rarities because printing costs being what they were, they made no business sense. Remove book printing from the equation, you remove most restraints on length--other than the demands of the story.

The same thing happened to the music album upon the advent of the compact disc. To that point, albums were around 40 minutes long, and not because God had decreed it be so, but because that was all you could fit on an LP. Double and even triple albums (Sandinista!) existed, but were rare.

Length restrictions were not all bad, by any means. The LP forced a measure of discipline, and if you have novel-bloat along the lines of album-bloat, quality may suffer. The Rising would have been a lot better at Born to Run length. But works needn't be longer. Perhaps we'll see something of a renaissance for the short story, for it too will be freed from its periodical fetters. "Short story length" and "novel length" may become quaint terms.

That's not to say that length will no longer matter. A 200,000-word novel still requires a greater investment of time from a publisher than a 90,000 one. And though "The Swimmer" might be an infinitely more rewarding read than say, anything by Dan Brown, few people will pay more for it.

As brick-and-mortar bookstores, both used and new, disappear and readership shrinks, fiction may become even more experimental, both in terms of form and subject matter. Comic books certainly got more interesting when they became an obscure hobby, available only in specialty shops where the casual reader would never tread. Of course, comic books may disappear once their remaining audience of thirty- and fortysomething white men get old and die. But that's another story.