Tiny books fit in one hand
“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. Apart from minor cosmetic tweaks, the form has barely evolved since the codex first arose as an appealing alternative to scrolls around 2,000 years ago.
So when Julie Strauss-Gabel, president and publisher of Dutton Books for Young Readers, discovered “dwarsliggers” — tiny, pocketsize, horizontal flipbacks that have become a wildly popular print format in the Netherlands — it felt like a revelation.
“I saw it and I was like, boom,” she said. “I started a mission to figure out how we could do that here.
“We’re in a situation where millimeters count,” Strauss-Gabel added.
This month, Dutton, which is part of Penguin Random House, began releasing its first batch of minibooks, with four reissued novels by best-selling 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.
When Strauss-Gabel asked Green if he would be interested in making his novels a test case for the format in the United States, he was immediately intrigued.
“She called me and said, ‘Have you seen any of these’ — my Dutch pronunciation is so bad, so just assume that I’m saying the word — ‘We’re thinking about doing them, and would you be interested?’ ” Green recalled.
It felt like a rare opportunity to innovate in print, so he jumped at it.
“Like a lot of writers, I’m a complete nerd for book making and the little details that make a physical book really special,” Green said. “It didn’t feel like a gimmick, it feels like an interesting, different way to read.”
Green, the author of the global blockbuster The Fault in Our Stars, is in some ways the ideal author to launch this experiment.
He’s got a devoted young fan base — his novels have more than 50 million copies in print — and a huge social media following, with more than 5 million followers on Twitter and 3.1 million subscribers on YouTube
through his Vlogbrothers channel, which he runs with his brother, Hank.
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.”