Word: instanteous
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University presses and some other small publishers have generally continued in their traditional niche of releasing academic (and rather obscure) titles. Some larger publishing houses, however, have carved out a new mold for themselves as Instant Gratification Machines of sorts, anticipating and catering to the public’s wants. And, until very recently, these two areas of the industry, the small-scale specialized press and the large-scale mainstream press, seemed destined to drift further apart...
...Rise of the “Instant Book?...
...read? For a good while, publishers believed they had the answer: entertainment, mostly, though preferably veiled as roundtable-worthy deliberation. They therefore spent much of the 90s working to combine this public desire with the industry’s newfound quick-response ethic. The result? The “instant book”—a cheap and profitable species of paperback. Furthermore, publishers pounced on so-called “hot-button” books, which dealt with the sensational, the “exclusive,” the controversial and often, the lurid side of the popular...
...Instant books, remember, are manufactured for mass production and painless digestion (not unlike the better fast food). They provide quick, cheap relief from ignorance; and they allow for high-speed printing and easy marketing. But with Sept. 11, such slapdash methods no longer seem appropriate, for a variety of reasons. First, the state of the current crisis is extremely fluid. This was not an issue with, say, John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s death...
Publishers are cautious about ordering up material that may soon be deemed irrelevant (better to leave that to periodicals). Second, the events are so complex and interconnected that they beg to be considered in a variety of lights, which a lone book or two cannot encompass. People still want instant information, but the kind of information they seek has suddenly, dramatically increased in scope. The same person who buys a book of patriotic photographs might also be interested in a comprehensive analysis of bioterrorism...