We should do microbooks.
Electronic microbooks.
Like Apps, for $.99 each - sold as iPad/Kindle reads, with graphic.
Shorter than proper books, longer than blog entries or articles, designed to be of some lasting value. Something to read on a train, or a plain.
Yes, in the fiction limit this is the traditional short story, but there should be a potentially interesting niche here for educational material and general non-fictional commentary.
For impulse buys, viral reads, fast updates on interesting things.
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http://annualrevirews.org/ ?
Comprehensive review articles of a field, mini- or updated textbooks.
Or is this what PhD lit reviews are for? keeping their less comprehensively-read supervisors up to date with the field...
Tyler Cowen beat you to it (though at 4x your suggested price).
No, not like Annual Reviews - they are more in the $99 category with a few long technical articles.
I was thinking more like the mini-books Penguin issued 10-20 years ago (don't know if they still do).
And not necessarily as technical as an Ann Rev.
I'd personally be interested in "for non-expert" articles, like getting to pick which feature articles in semi-technical mags to read.
But it has to be easy shopping and easy access - iTunes model with very low effort micropayments from a central account
Hmmm. So, not simply a literary version of lecture notes, but more substantial. Not an article for the technical literature, but something more extended and perhaps less technical. Are you thinking of items like the "Science Study Series" of books from Doubleday Anchor in the late fifties and early sixties? Those books were relatively short, around 150 pages, packed full of information, and aimed at the interested layman. I see a note on the title of page of "The Physics of Television" which states "Available to secondary school students and teachers through Wesleyan University Press Incorporated." I like to read books in this series myself to learn about stuff like, well, television, nuclear physics, and other topics outside my own field.
This would be a labor of love, I suppose, since I don't know how much credit an academic would receive for writing such a book, and I doubt that the income would amount to very much. Can anyone tell me what fraction of the price of apps or electronic books goes to the author?
Still, anything that brings back the monograph can't be a bad thing. I'd purchase one.
@mph - great minds etc...
Based on my personal shopping experience, I think shorter monographs and lower price point are optimal.
Trick is marketing and interface: I think even amazon is too cumbersome, an iTunes/App store type market would work.
'course the content can be anything, and if history is anything to go by, pr0n would probably lead initial sales and development. Fiction, humour, op-ed would all have niches.
But I can see a substantial market in semi-technical literature, and a long tail for expert level monographs. Could be interesting.