the unprecedented pileup of historic news is motivating a broader industry speedup. Hoping to capture the public interest while it is still ripe—and to beat out competition—publishers are rushing out a cavalcade of books tied to the election of the first African-American president, a spiraling economic crisis and eye-popping financial scandals.
This form of “extreme publishing” challenges a more traditional view of book production:
Many publishers maintain that books are not meant to chase headlines. “What we need to do on the book side is to do the most thorough, the best and most contextualized” work, said Ann Godoff, president and publisher of the Penguin Press.
