Sam Harris recently published Lying, his first Kindle single. How Sam sees the publishing industry's problem:
If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-
page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?
The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem.
Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing.
In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.
As often, Sam is onto something. I have a book in the back of my head that I am slowly turning over. But I know that even if it did extremely well, it would only muster a fraction of the readership that the Dish offers each day. A really successful, highishbrow book will sell, say, 30,000 copies. I just had that many eye-balls in the last hour or two. In a week, I have more eyeballs than all my books put together – and they have all been in the 300 page range. If I think of making a sustained argument, as in Virtually Normal, I now wonder if self-publishing a pamphlet like Sam's wouldn't be more worthwhile. And, of course, The Cannabis Closet, our second print-on-demand book, is only 118 pages and available for just $5.95. Explanation of the project here. A reader keeps the fires burning:
One of the highlights of Tuesday is reading the VFYW guesses. Every week there seems to be at least one interesting "another" that has a fun story about the location of the VFYW. So … why don't you assign your crew to gather the most interesting e-mail from each week and compile volume II of the View From Your Window book with the best VFYW's from the contest? As you turn the pages, the VFYW is on one page and on the opposite page is the e-mail you received from one of your readers that gives their story on how they new it.
Now that we have the help of interns Maisie and Zack, who joined the Dish this summer, we hope to be able to crank out a few more slim volumes in the near future.
The Dish 