Thin Book

Shane Mc Chesney introduced me to the joys of the Thin Book. A relief from the Fat Book

• For every unemployed dot com casualty looking for a quick way back into the game, there's a harried developer with more To Dos than they have waking hours. Neither type of developer has the time to read an 800+ page bible on any subject.

• Can a profit be made publishing thin books for narrow audiences? Can they be inexpensive too?

• The size of the book drives two important outcomes I've written about before, in my Thin Book Movement article: first, the book was cheap enough that it was easy to buy on impulse, and it was an obvious value choice over other books on the market that cost 4x to 8x as much. Second, the book is thin enough to actually read, to start with an actual hope of finishing.

Does an Essay count as a Thin Book of its own? An Excerpt, a Wikipedia page? :)

Does this need to be Non-Fiction?

• Nah, think of the challenges of the Short Story or Novell A.

Should this have a HowTo focus?

Or does a large Pamphlet qualify?

Jan'2011: Kindle Single-s now available.

Mar'2013: or maybe you have a full-sized book, but with automated highlighting (Highlighting And Annotating) of the key passages for easier skimming? See related Brins Earth Semantic Content filtering.

• On the other hand, one of the problems with longer books is that the structure isn't made explicit enough. And sometimes the structure as-written isn't very well designed, whereas someone writing a summary of the book will tend to create a cleaner structure. Some maybe you want a combination.
  • MoonReader has a nice feature to hit a button and have the EPub Table Of Contents open in a scrollable Pop Up, with your current position highlighted. Maybe some way to tell it "no, this (non-author human-created) TOC is the TOC to use"???