Quick take: That book with the URL

. . . instead of notes

This weekend’s kerfuffle in Book World centers around Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message, a New York Times bestseller that seems to be approximately everywhere. I haven’t read it and have nothing to say about its contents. The bigger topic in my corner of social media right now is the decision to publish with a URL directing to “notes on sources” instead of having notes or a bibliography in the book itself. Here’s the post that started things; click through for some of the critical reaction:

I’ll stress that I know absolutely nothing about this decision by Coates’s publisher, One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. It’s a publisher of many great books that, like any big commercial house, is serious about profitability. In fact, Penguin Random’s aggressiveness about costs is in the news—as I’ve noted before, their CEO is on record saying Artificial Intelligence will make it “easier to publish more titles without hiring ever more employees.”

And while their decision here wouldn’t seem to have anything to do with AI, maybe it should be seen through the same lens of innovation. Conventional notes are an expense, not just in paper but in labor and time. (Think for example of the time spent copyediting and proofreading notes—often literal fine print that can’t be fixed if a mistake slips through the way that web content can be continually tweaked.) Penguin Random’s decision to ditch traditional notes means a book that comes out faster while keeping costs (and ultimately sticker price) down—all things that lots of people seem to want, achieved by mobilizing a solution rooted in technology’s new affordances.

Except that maybe people don’t want it. And here I’d encourage readers with strong feelings about books to consider trade-offs, particularly if they value traditional investments like note sections. Pressure to reduce costs and make faster, cheaper books is real. When innovation strikes people as misguided, I hope they’ll take it as an opportunity to support publishers who continue to do the things they care about.¹

1. One of the more deflating Hot Takes on social media this weekend used the Coates book to express worry about whether URLs will replace notes as the norm among scholarly publishers. But the publisher in this instance is one of the largest trade houses in the world—not one of the scholarly publishers still managing to include notes in its books despite having (generally speaking) a fraction of Penguin Random’s resources. I’m admittedly sensitive on this point because of the work I do with not-for-profit university presses, but scholarly publishers are such a punching bag that some observers will beat up on them for the bad things they haven’t done. If a scrappy publisher still manages to include a notes section, stop spinning hypotheticals. Praise them!