I recently sat down and read 15 of these boutique mini-books. Most are blah; a few are so subliterate they made my temples ache. But several — like John Hooper’s reportage on the Costa Concordia disaster, Jane Hirshfield on haiku and Jonathan Mahler on Joe Paterno — are so good they awaken you to the promise of what feels almost like a new genre: long enough for genuine complexity, short enough to avoid adding journalistic starches and fillers.
Others ride blithely off the rails. Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor, has written “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic” ($1.99). It’s about how money has ruined politics, and about how Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Streeters should collaborate to fix this problem. Mr. Lessig is right, but he’s insufferable. His book is earnest, patronizing and so dull that I flipped my Kindle over, searching for a snooze button.
Bonus quotation from Dwight Garner’s Kindle Singles, Genre Between Magazine Articles and Books - NYTimes.com
The New York Times reported a 73 percent gain in circulation fueled in large part by digital gains. In fact, the Times’ daily digital subscribers exceed its daily print subscribers.
The forests rejoice! ABC: Newspaper circulation rose in last six months, 5% on Sundays | Poynter.
Apparently people still subscribe to physical newspapers.
