TECH SPECIAL..... Now, tiny books that feel like smartphones

Now, tiny books that feel like smartphones

Pocket-Size Horizontal Flipbacks With Paper As Thin As Onion Skin May Change The Way People Read

 “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic,” 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. So when Julie Strauss-Gabel, 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.

This month, Dutton, which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing its first batch of mini books, with four reissued novels by bestselling 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.

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.

The mini versions of 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 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,” 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.”

“We’re in a situation where millimeters count,” Strauss-Gabel said.

Alexandra Alter

NYT NEWS SERVICE