From the desk of Mr. Monk

The future of digital book publishing: #1

The most common way of thinking about digital books is to emulate physical books. Looking at other publishing formats I would conclude that this is the wrong way to think about it. iTunes for example, made it easy to buy one song from an album (the one you really like, maybe a guilty pleasure) and forget obiut the other 11 tracks you really can’t stand.

What is books were published by chapter? You could buy them bit by bit, better value for money; especially if you don’t like the book early on!

At first this sounds stupid but I can think of 2 good uses.

Say you’re studying and you see a book that’s jammed full of information on a broad subject but you only need a section that writes about your specific subject area. You could save a lot of money right?

The second idea is; scheduled chapter releases. The industry wants to revive the excitement it once had… Build hype by releasing single chapters on a weekly basis! It might just give the written word the accessibility that the MTV generation are looking for.