Since I arrived at HarperStudio in June we’ve been asking the question how do people read today and how will they read ten years from now? (Of course “reading” is an impossibly broad term; curling up with a first edition of The Good Soldier and gazing at your cousin’s ex-girlfriend’s Facebook profile both technically meet the description.) But one thing I hear over and over again from readers with vastly different sensibilities is “I don’t have time to sit down and read an entire book.”

Hence why more publishers have begun selling individual chapters online, something I think we’re going to see more and more of, (Stephen King was one of the first), and something I support – though not everyone does. Leon Neyfekh addresses the question of selling individual pieces in his recent post “In Age of Shortness, Why Shouldn’t Fiction be Sold by the Piece?”. Apparently Matt Weiland, the deputy editor of The Paris Review, is opposed to selling individual chapters of his forthcoming anthology State by State (co-edited with Sean Wilsey).

“I think one of the pleasures of doing this kind of work is that you’re making something larger than the sum of its parts…Part of the thing about being an editor and a publisher is … that you’re making selections, you’re curating. We do it because we think all the stuff we selected is really good and worth reading. To go with some a la carte model seems to sap some of the wonder and the curiosity and the strangeness of good publishing out of it.”

On the one hand, I absolutely agree that an editor’s job is to curate and, ideally, an anthology is greater than the sum of its parts, but why not give people the choice? I mean, “good publishing” is absolutely about “wonder and curiosity,” but isn’t it also about getting as many people as possible to read the content you have so thoughtfully hand picked? Wouldn’t selling individual essays online create an environment in which a relatively unknown author’s piece could go viral and reach an exponentially larger audience? (A phenomenon we see time and again with music singles).

I guess relying on the public in this fashion places the act of curation more squarely in the hands of the reader, not the editor/ publisher. And that can be a hard pill to swallow.

Julia