What Is A Book And Why Does It Matter?

By Richard Hamilton, special to The Content Wrangler

According to the Open Dictionary, a book is: “Sheets of paper bound together to hinge at one edge. If blank sheets of paper this is commonly referred to as a notebook, however most books are printed material.”

The book is evolving. What will it look like in 10 years?

The definition above is remarkably consistent across dictionaries, but while this is the “dictionary” definition, it is not a true picture of what most of us think of when we think of a book. Over the hundreds of years that make up the history of books, we have built up a set of expectations that go far beyond the dictionary definition.

This expectation even carries over to the blank book. If you’ve ever owned a bound, blank book – and judging from the space given over to blank books in book stores, a lot of us have – I’ll bet that you treat it differently from the way you treat a spiral bound notebook or pad of paper. You probably don’t use it for shopping lists, reminders, or other ephemeral writings. Almost unconsciously, we place a higher standard on what we put into a book.

To explore what a book means, beyond “sheets of paper bound together,” let’s look at the process used to create a book from material that is already published. I’ll use as my example Joel Spolsky’s two books, Joel on Software and More Joel on Software, both published by Apress. Spolsky publishes a blog titled, Joel on Software, and over nine years he has published more than 1,000 articles. These two books compile a selection of his articles.

Looking into the process that created these books from his blog can help us understand what differentiates a “book” from “content,” and provide insight into what authors and publishers need to focus on as we move into the world of electronic publishing. The process of creating these books required the following steps:

Selection

There are two aspects to the question of selection. A publisher, in this case Apress, had to select Spolsky’s books over other potential publications. Secondly, Spolsky had to select which of his 1,000 articles to use for the book.

Joel Spolsky Organized His Book in the way that books have been organized traditionally, not the way blogs are organized on the web.

This a major function of publishers and one reason why brand-name publishers have an advantage. If they are good, they have built a reputation for selecting material that sells – a smaller number have even built a reputation for selecting quality material.

Organization

Spolsky organized the articles into chapters with themes, for example, “Managing Large Projects,” or “Starting a Software Business.” We expect that the material in a book will be organized in a manner that will make it easy to use. Most readers would be disappointed if Spolsky had arranged the articles by publication date or alphabetically.

Editing

Spolsky didn’t just dump content into the book. He and the editors at Apress went through the book and edited it for content (are things out of date, should there be references to other material in the book, etc.) and for detail (copy editing). In addition, they created an index.

While you can make a pretty good argument that editorial standards have slipped – no author expects the kind of editing Maxwell Perkins did for Hemingway and Faulkner – I think it is still fair to say that we expect the material in a book to meet a higher standard than we would expect from a newspaper article, letter, blog entry, or other more casual communication.

Packaging

The Spolsky books have a good, readable book design and interesting covers. We expect that from a book, and we are generally disappointed if we get a slapped together design and packaging.

Distribution networks like iTunes and the iBook Store are revolutionizing digital product distribution.

Distribution

The Spolsky books are distributed through traditional book channels and web retailers in print and ebook formats, another reasonable expectation for most books, though this is changing.

As you can see, even a book that is simply a compilation of existing blog articles carries with it a set of expectations that go well beyond the dictionary definition of book. If Spolsky and Apress had not met those expectations, I believe these books would have sunk without a trace; instead, the first is still in the top 100 software engineering books on Amazon as I write this article, nearly 6 years after publication, and the second is not far behind. Even as we shed the physical definition of a book with e-books and other electronic means of distribution, we still need to honor the process described above in order to produce books that people will choose to purchase.

The second part of this two-part article will look at the question, “why does the definition of a book matter?” and the relevance of that question to authors and publishers. As a teaser, I’ll offer that it matters because none of the items listed above goes away when you publish in electronic form; they are all still critical when you are trying to assemble something that you want people to pay for. But, every one of them is changing; if you ignore them or think you can go on treating them the same way you always have, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

About the Author

Richard L. Hamilton is Founder and Publisher of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, and marketers. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the upcoming 2^nd edition of Norm Walsh’s DocBook: The Definitive Guide, to be published in collaboration with O’Reilly Media.

XML Press is the publisher of Anne Gentle’s Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, and in 2010 will publish new books by Brenda Huettner, Alan Porter, and Zarella Rendon.

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