This week, I worked with Morgan Mahlock, writer of the excellent newsletter alohomora, to talk about books.
Books: wonderfully vestigial, a rare remaining player in our information environment divorced from the idea of immediacy — things that face real manufacturing and distribution hurdles to their arrival.
There are more books than ever. They feel less relevant, but in another regard, they feel more sacred.
What’s going to happen next?
Popularization: the mass market
For most of history, books were too expensive for the average person. During the Great Depression, struggling Penguin Random House deigned to broaden its market and invent the paperback.
Over the next two decades, books became "weapons in the war of ideas,” wrapped up in a sense of patriotism and values. 120 million plus “Armed Services editions” were given away to soldiers during WW2, embodying an anti-censorship ethos in opposition to the Axis powers and driving a broad cultural appetite for books in subsequent decades.
Post-war lifecycle changes turned this into a habit. The American middle class was born; bookshelves were built into postwar suburban homes; the GI bill made a college education more accessible than ever before. Meanwhile, innovations to the book manufacturing process (ex., the invention of the photocomposition process) put downward pressure on costs.
Headwinds
We can all feel the inundating amount of content in the world, but it’s still staggering to realize that more than one million books are self-published each year—in addition to a few hundred thousand that go to market via the traditional publishing route.
This is a difficult, hits-driven business model with just enough legacy distribution to adapt slowly. As one publishing house writes:
“No other industry has so many new product introductions. Every new book is a new product, needing to be acquired, developed, reworked, designed, produced, named, manufactured, packaged, priced, introduced, marketed, warehoused, and sold. Yet the average new book generates only $50,000 to $100,000 in sales…”
Meanwhile, revenue has been stagnant, and headwinds are pulling in the other direction: the average American ages 15-44 reads, on average, for 10 minutes or less per day.
A single book competes for your attention not just with the other 130 million books out in the universe, but (to paraphrase Reed Hastings) with every other entertainment option out there, from Fortnite to HBO to sleep.
And yet I think everyone feels that books — clunky, misshapen, analog objects — are more magical than ever. What is it? (And how can it be made to work as a business?)
Forming tribes: the niche market
The same headwinds that have led to the book industry stagnating (in its current form) have also created a broader sense of information chaos.
On the internet, there is no master adjudicator of perspectives. Centralized gatekeepers (ex., ABC News’s Twitter) are not necessarily dead but they certainly feel vestigial or at least slow out of the gate.
Instead, our interests, powered by whatever internet discovery heuristics we’ve cobbled together, navigate us to information faucets that we feel we can trust.
The formlessness of that environment increases the compulsion to find communities. These communities — tribes, more accurately — can be both bad and good.
We find personal Twitter subcultures and podcasts to follow, and we come to identify with them. Twitter followers apotheosize popular pontificators into their kings (in tech: Naval, Jack Butcher, David Perell). This has extended, also, to products. A note-taking software (?) called Roam has produced a tribe called Roamians, also known as Roam Cult. If I can disassociate with my desire to be in the in-group long enough, it’s clear how strange this is.
With geographic hurdles removed, ever-more specific communities will be (and are being) created. With distribution hurdles removed, content will become more specific; less mass-market, and more aligned with what we are willing to pay for. It will be niche and speak directly to tribes.
This can be mapped, productively, against a willingness to pay, which is almost always highest for stuff that is new, surprising, and interesting to a particular subculture. A few weeks ago Ben Thompson wrote about this in The Idea Adoption Curve:
Creating artifacts
The new communities at the beginning of the idea curve live entirely on the internet, where they can meet in their idiosyncrasy without geographic hurdles.
There means they live in ephemeral mediums: tweets, fleets, and newsletters that get buried at the bottom of your inbox.
There is something to be said about apotheosizing the experiences of those communities into sturdy, old-fashioned, hold-it-in-your-hand objects.
A company that writes the book (haha) on how to do this is Stripe Press, a media arm of Stripe. Stripe Press’s books ( Working in Public, Revolt of the Public) formalize the musings of internet tech communities into tangible objects that are, most importantly, really beautiful.
Their books are sturdily bound and well-designed. They’re anti-paperbacks: relics and heirlooms, retreats from the digital ephemeral. This is a pendulum swing from the trend ushered in during WWII.
Other case studies: the Farnam Street Mental Models collection, which looks like a classic; the twitter-famous Almanack of Naval, powered by the Naval cult; and the upcoming Roam book, filled with community aphorisms and surrounded by full-page visualizations.
Evidence of success exists for community-propelled publishing; the challenge is economics and scale as a standalone business model.
The slow-dying (and probably never-fully-evaporating) strength of legacy distribution means that disruption will likely come from the outside.
For disruptors, the higher unit price doesn’t offset niche distribution and leads to a much smaller pie that is very challenging to horizontalize. That’s why the examples we’ve shown don’t look like a traditional publishing house: Stripe Press is a brand marketing project. The Almanack of Naval is given away for free. Farnam Street first released The Great Mental Models Collection to a paid-only online community ($149-249 per year).
Thank you to Thad McIlroy for providing key input and insights!
Companies doing cool things in this space:
Substack—hiring engineers, PMs, and more
Stripe—hiring for a lot of things!
Farnam Street—not hiring rn :/ but cool
Princeton University Press—hiring a copublication specialist
MIT Press—hiring an editorial assistant and a sales associate
Other links…
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - Morgan’s favorite book (and movie)
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - Lea’s favorite book
Until next time,
Lea Boreland