“A book is proof
that humans are capable of working magic,” the cosmologist Carl
Sagan once said. “It’s a flat object made from a tree with
flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person,
maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.”
As a physical object
and a feat of technology, the printed book is hard to improve upon.
Apart from minor cosmetic tweaks, the form has barely evolved since
the codex first arose as an appealing alternative to scrolls around
2,000 years ago.
So when Julie
Strauss-Gabel, the president and publisher of Dutton Books for Young
Readers, discovered “dwarsliggers” — tiny, pocket-size,
horizontal flipbacks that have become a wildly popular print format
in the Netherlands — it felt like a revelation.
“I saw it and I
was like, boom,” she said. “I started a mission to figure out how
we could do that here.”
This month, Dutton,
which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing its first
batch of mini books, with four reissued novels by the best-selling
young-adult novelist John Green. The tiny editions are the size of a
cellphone and no thicker than your thumb, with paper as thin as onion
skin. They can be read with one hand — the text flows horizontally,
and you can flip the pages upward, like swiping a smartphone.
It’s a bold
experiment that, if successful, could reshape the publishing
landscape and perhaps even change the way people read. Next year,
Penguin Young Readers plans to release more minis, and if readers
find the format appealing, other publishers may follow suit.
Mr. Green was
already familiar with dwarsliggers, which he first saw several years
ago, when he was living in Amsterdam (the term comes from the Dutch
words “dwars,” or crossways, and “liggen,” to lie, and also
means a person or thing that stands out as different). In the last
decade or so, the format has spread across Europe, and nearly 10
million copies have been sold, with mini editions of popular
contemporary authors like Dan Brown, John le Carré, Ian McEwan and
Isabel Allende, as well as classics by Agatha Christie and F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
When Ms.
Strauss-Gabel asked Mr. Green if he would be interested in making his
novels a test case for the format in the United States, he was
immediately intrigued.
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“She called me and
said, ‘Have you seen any of these’ — my Dutch pronunciation is
so bad, so just assume that I’m saying the word — ‘We’re
thinking about doing them, and would you be interested?’” Mr.
Green recalled.
It felt like a rare
opportunity to innovate in print, so he jumped at it.
“Like a lot of
writers, I’m a complete nerd for book making and the little details
that make a physical book really special,” Mr. Green said. “It
didn’t feel like a gimmick, it feels like an interesting, different
way to read.”
Mr. Green, the
author of the global blockbuster “The Fault in Our Stars,” is in
some ways the ideal author to start this experiment. He’s got a
devoted young fan base — his novels have more than 50 million
copies in print — and a huge social media following, with more than
five million followers on Twitter and 3.1 million subscribers on
YouTube through his Vlogbrothers channel, which he runs with his
brother, Hank.
The mini versions of
Mr. Green’s novels — “Looking for Alaska,” “An Abundance of
Katherines,” “Paper Towns” and “The Fault in Our Stars” —
will be sold for $12 each, or $48 for a boxed set, at major retail
chains like Barnes & Noble, Walmart and Target as well as
independent bookstores, where they will often be given prime
placement on counters next to the register. With their appeal as
design objects, mini books could eventually make their way into
furniture and design stores and outlets like Urban Outfitters and
Anthropologie, potentially broadening publishers’ customer base.
Dutton and Mr. Green
are hoping that younger readers from a generation that grew up with
the internet and smartphones might be receptive to the concept of a
miniature flipbook.
“Young people are
still learning how they like to read,” Mr. Green said. “It is
much closer to a cellphone experience than standard books, but it’s
much closer to a book than a cellphone. The whole problem with
reading on a phone is that my phone also does so many other things.”
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Over the centuries,
publishers have experimented with smaller paperback books,
occasionally with great success. In 1939, Pocket Books introduced
pocket-size mass-market paperbacks in the United States, and sold
them in department stores, newsstands and drugstores around the
country. During World War II, an effort to arm American troops with
books gave rise to Armed Services Editions, miniature paperbacks that
troops carried with them, which helped create a new audience for
mass-market paperbacks.
The books, called
dwarsliggers in the Netherlands, are the size of a cellphone and made
with paper as thin as onion skin.CreditEric Helgas for The New York
Times
But in the last few
decades, most of the pivotal advances in publishing have been
digital, with the evolution of e-books and digital audio.
Recently, some
publishers have tried shrinking print books as a way to repackage
older backlist titles, in an effort to entice readers to buy new
editions of books they already know and love, and own. Three years
ago, Picador released mini books by Denis Johnson, Jeffrey Eugenides,
Hermann Hesse and Marilynne Robinson — the tiny editions are 5
13/16 inches tall by 3 11/16 inches wide — to celebrate the
imprint’s 20th anniversary. The form was so popular with
independent booksellers that Picador decided to publish another
collection in 2017 — of nonfiction titles by Hilary Mantel, Susan
Sontag, Joan Didion and Barbara Ehrenreich — and is planning to
release more next fall.
Ms. Strauss-Gabel
began her mission to import flipbacks to America this year, when she
received Dutch editions of two of Mr. Green’s novels. She was
startled by their size and ingenious design — the spine operates
like a hinge that swings open, making it easier to turn the pages.
She contacted the Dutch printer, Royal Jongbloed, and asked if Dutton
could become partners with the company to print English editions.
Jongbloed, which was founded in 1862 as a bookshop and later became a
Bible printer, created the flipback format in 2009, and quickly
realized there was a wide audience for compact, portable books. They
have since released 570 titles in the Netherlands alone, including
works by Mr. McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and
Philip Kerr.
But getting English
flipback editions of Mr. Green’s books proved endlessly
complicated. Jongbloed is currently the only printer in the world
that makes them, using ultrathin but durable paper from a mill in a
village in Finland. The first sample pages that Jongbloed sent looked
cluttered, with letters and words crammed too close together.
Dutton’s designers experimented with different fonts and spacing
and sent the printer a revised layout. Reformatting “An Abundance
of Katherines,” a book that has footnotes and mathematical
equations, was especially tricky.
“We’re in a
situation where millimeters count,” Ms. Strauss-Gabel said.
It’s unclear if
even a literary and social media supernova like Mr. Green can
popularize an unfamiliar new format. But Dutton is cautiously
optimistic that the minis will take off during the holiday retail
season, and is printing an initial run of 500,000 copies.
“I have no idea
how people will respond to this,” Mr. Green said. “They’re
objects that you almost can’t get until you’re touching them.”