the length of texts

Charlie Stross asks an interesting question: “Why are novels (the prevailing form of fictional entertainment on retail sale today) generally the length that they are?”

Back in the mid to late Victorian period, when books were frequently printed and sold as weekly serials, in chapter-sized magazines that could be bound together, the length of a book was really dictated by the author's (and printer's) stamina. In contrast, as I mentioned in my last blog entry, I've got a book coming out this month which is actually not a stand-alone novel, although that's what it's listed as in the publisher's catalog — it's the sixth (and final) installment in a multi-book story, six volumes long. Why isn't that story coming out in a single binding?

It looks obvious at first — novels are the length they are because, well, they're novels — but in truth, the length of a novel varies depending on the prevailing publishing industry distribution model when it's written. . . .

Going forward, I speculate that if we make a successful transition to ebooks — that is: if ebooks become a major sales channel and authors are still writing professional quality work for money, and readers are finding some way to pay them — we may see a revival of other formats: novellas for one (they're undergoing a renaissance in SF publishing among the smaller publishers), the Dickensian serial for another, and the gigantic shoebox-sized monster for a third. The corsetting of the modern novel to fit between the tight constraints of binding costs and price elasticity of demand will be unstrung, or replaced by bras, or some other over-stressed metaphorical construct.

I find this scenario both plausible and exciting. The constraints Stross describes in book-publishing — the whole post is quite detailed on these matters — are matched by a similar set of constraints in the periodical world. For periodical fiction and nonfiction alike, there are a set of containers of more-or-less fixed sizes, and stories, essays, and reports need to fit into those containers. Some of the most celebrated moments in the history of the New Yorker, for instance, center on deviations from those norms: John Hersey’s Hiroshima), which took up a whole issue — and can you imagine the magazine today running a story the length of Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924”, no matter who wrote it? (Well, maybe. But it would be a cause célèbre.) Digital environments could turn out to be ideal homes for the miniaturist and the super-expansive writer alike.

the good old days

Charlie Stross:

As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.

(Via Jessamyn.)