More books being sold in sideways miniature format
John Green is one of the biggest young-adult authors in the world. Now he wants to get small. Four of his best-selling novels — including The Fault in Our Stars — will be released this October in a radically new miniature format. All the original words will be there, but the pages will be squeezed down to something about the size of a cellphone.
But that’s just the start of this real-life episode of “Honey, I Shrunk the Books.” These Penguin Minis from Penguin Young Readers are not only smaller than you’re used to, they’re also horizontal. You read these little books by flipping the pages up rather than turning them across. It’s meant to be a one-handed maneuver, like swiping a screen.
For anyone accustomed to holding a book — that is, anyone older than 2 — the first reaction is likely to be delight and then bewilderment. As Umberto Eco once said: “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”
Green would beg to disagree. “It really only takes a second to get used to,” he says. “I’m shocked by how readable they are.”
Green first saw these minibooks in the Netherlands, where they’re called Flipbacks or Dwarsliggers (dwars meaning crossways; liggen meaning to lie). “I thought the quality of the bookmaking was really magnificent,” he says. When his U.S. publisher asked if he wanted to be a guinea pig for Flipbacks in the United States, he readily agreed.
“I haven’t seen a new book format that I thought was at all interesting,” Green says, “but I find this format really usable and super-portable.” And young people may be the perfect audience for a new way to read: “They probably aren’t as set in their ways in how they interact with books. And in some ways, these books are more similar to a phone-shaped experience.”
But creating that phone-shaped experience on paper was a headache-shaped experience for the publisher.
Julie Strauss-Gabel, president of Dutton Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers, discovered the Dwarsliggers almost by accident when a Dutch copy of one of Green’s novels came into her office. “The minute I picked it up, I thought, ‘How do we not have these in this country?’ ”
Indeed, it’s taken a surprisingly long time for Flipbacks to make a splash in the United States. Dutch printer Royal Jongbloed, which started as a Bible publisher, debuted the format in 2009. Since then, Jongbloed has helped publish more than 1,000 titles — including works by Dan Brown, John le Carré and Agatha Christie — in Flipback format in several European countries.
The spine, a unique hinge that allows the chunky little book to remain open, is the heart of this feat of miniaturization. And the special paper — long used for Bibles — is miraculously thin without being transparent.
When Strauss-Gabel decided to work with Jongbloed to bring Flipback versions of Green’s titles to the United States, everything about the appearance of his books had to be rethought, from how big the font should be to how many lines could fit on the pages. Strauss-Gabel says her team didn’t just want “something that looked nice, but something you really could hold open and read. It’s all extraordinarily complicated.”