A Book Is a Start-up: Lessons from Leanpub, Net Minds, and Other Publishing Hustlers: The New Yorker The world of digital publishing start-ups brings to mind blogging in its nascent stages. The guiding principle seems to be: if anyone can scribble on the Internet's wall, anyone can become an author, and any text can become a book. Online, a book's form warps into something more malleable, and fired-up digital publishers are trying to figure out how to turn that into a business - even if it means a proliferation of books that might as well have been blog posts. "A book is a startup," declared Peter Armstrong in a speech about his serialized book company, Leanpub. I said it in 2010, and I'll say it again. Armstrong had on Steve Jobs couture - a long-sleeved black shirt and blue jeans - as he addressed a packed audience in New York at the Tools of Change conference, three days of workshops about the future of books, specialized breakout sessions, and an e-reading exhibition called the "Digital Petting Zoo." This was a house of mobile apps and metadata, seemingly built in a clearing in the wilderness; there was something of an adventurous spirit, as if making a book were unchartered terrain. The halls were buzzing with frenetic publishers and entrepreneurs. Many were tweeting furiously. This corner of the publishing world envisions a book as a technological enterprise, and the Web's hustlers are riding in from every direction to get in on the market. Their approach is informed by scrappy tech culture, but motivated by the literary cachet of books. Tim Sanders, a former Yahoo executive who is now the C.E.O. of Net Minds, a service for crowd-sourcing book production, said that it's "the allure of the book" that entices people to work on one. Sanders founded Net Minds about a year ago. "The biggest problem with authors today is that they overestimate their writing and editing skills," he said, adding that, without editing, "It would have been "The Meh Gatsby."" Then he told me his solution: "Run your book like a start-up." Armstrong suggests that a book and a start-up are each "a risky, highly creative endeavor undertaken by a small team, with low probability of success." In either case, he says, you can go into "stealth mode" - which, he contends, will easily result in creating something that nobody wants. "To say you're going to go off in a room and write the perfect thing without getting feedback from anybody is - I don't want to say "arrogant" - but I couldn't do it." Editors, he adds, "function as a good proxy for readers" - but are not as effective as readers themselves. And so, it follows that the solution is to begin a project - in this case, a book - and let the people have at it. He calls this Lean Publishing, or "the act of publishing an in-progress book using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do." There are several other companies experimenting with letting readers in on the writing process: Sourcebooks has tried test-marketing early online editions, and the start-up Coliloquy has devised a choose-your-own-adventure model that allows readers to record their choices as they progress through books, providing authors with feedback. All this data can inform publishers about how to produce books with the most possible appeal - even if that means the writer's creative authority recedes, allowing popular demand to take control. "We believe a writer is not necessarily a writer," Sanders, the Net Minds C.E.O., said. They are content containers. At the Net Minds website, freelancers can sign up as writers or ghostwriters, as well as editors, copyreaders, designers, and publicists. The writer, then, arrives with a thought, for manufacture. The mechanics of book start-ups suggest an assembly line at times - indeed, the term "Lean" comes from the demand-driven Toyota Production System in Japan, put in place during the second half of the twentieth century. Lean is good commerce - if not necessarily the makings of high art. A start-up book, though, is for mere mortals. About five hundred people have registered for Net Minds so far, all recruited through Twitter and Facebook. Some have editing experience from, say, working on an internal corporate magazine, and others have none whatsoever. A majority are writers hoping to get published. Payment might be split equity in the book's sales, or some combination of that and a fee. Participants seek out one another through an online directory, Projects Looking for Partners. But, soon, matches will be made using a complex algorithm. "We're doing this eHarmony thing," Sanders said. It's almost like dating! As these companies avail themselves of business rhetoric for the sake of literature, their strongest selling point is speed. Sanders tilted forward and waved his hand. "I'll get you to the market in half the time of a traditional publisher," he said. Armstrong, who described Leanpub as a subset of self-publishing - "a combination of a tool chain and a storefront" - argued that pushing out books in the earliest phases - one chapter at a time, polished or not - is the best way to attract eyes. "It's going to take time to write the book," he explained. By the time the book is in the store, the people who are thought leaders and early adopters don't care. Still, there are faster, more efficient ways to disseminate information or tell a story than to produce a book. Blogging already provides an incremental publishing platform that is simple and free, adjustable and easily distributable; the distinct pleasure of a book - generally the result of months or years of work, whether published digitally or on paper - is that it's meant to be savored. So one wonders why, exactly, these companies have decided to make books in the first place. As reading habits evolve, the definition of a book can hardly be limited to the familiar, narrow terms. It can be developed in a sprint or like a video game, posted on a Web page or printed as a work of paper art, a hub of social interaction that becomes a book club or a rare escape through which a reader can power down the outside world. But what's enticing about a book is also what removes it from the tech start-up universe: it affords some separation from the flow of online time, and has its own kind of tangible, spatial existence. The book-as-start-up approach is a convergence of the digital world's ingenuity with publishing's ambition, but each side falters in approaching the other. Somehow, the idea of a book in the abstract seems to be edging out a real sense of what makes something actually worth reading. Sanders had a paper galley with him on the afternoon we met. It was the first Net Minds book, by Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, which will be available in two weeks. Its title could be a prescription for digital publishing: "Finding the Next Steve Jobs." Illustration by Otto Saglow.