The return of the business paperback

Shiromani Kant

A lot of people prefer to read business books on e-readers, but enshittification makes them less convenient, and their convenience might not matter as much any more. Meanwhile, with the right book designers and publishers, paperbacks have their own reader experience advantages.

E-readers & business trips

I like to read when I travel. Business travel includes a lot of waiting around, and while disconnecting from ‘the office’ has its advantages, it also gets boring. Travel time – offline, without an Internet connection – creates an opportunity for quiet focus.

Like other frequent travellers, I also like to optimise my packing. E-readers work especially well for people who read business books and travel for work. They typically weigh less than a business book, and weigh a lot less than several, which makes them great for business trips.

Online meetings & flight shame

I used to travel internationally a lot for work. In 2018, for example, for one of my many international trips, I flew transatlantic to the US for a single meeting, to give a software demo. A web application software demo. Fortunately, online meetings caught on.

Some of us who travelled a lot for work before 2020 find ourselves travelling a lot less since then. Not only have we learned how to work better online, as an industry, some of us realised that business travel deserves flight shame. And if you don’t travel as much, you have less reason to optimise your reading for packing weight.

E-book slop & obsolescence

Today, e-books find themselves among a wave of slop that diminishes what it used to mean to talk about publishing a book. This harms public libraries and cheats readers, while online retailers continue to take readers’ money for defective products.

Meanwhile, as old e-readers reach planned obsolescence, their owners find themselves having to junk working hardware. Closed-platform e-readers only lock you in until you have to buy a new device, at which point you could also just not do that, and return to paperbacks.

Paperback formats & MX

Several factors combine to make large-format business paperbacks like Reinventing organizations: an illustrated invitation (photo) more compelling:

1. the need to stand out from e-book slop
2. the value of colour illustrations and complex page layouts
3. the absence of height and weight restrictions when working from home
4. managers’ need to enhance their online executive presence with bookcases in their online meeting backgrounds.

At the same time as the realisation that EdTech just doesn’t work, business book authors could probably learn from the state of the art in textbook design. And just like small children, the business book audience would also prefer fewer words and more pictures.

The rise of user experience (UX) design has made software easier to use successfully, and work on developer experience (DX or DevEx) has improved software development. Perhaps companies need to start caring about the manager experience (MX). After all, managers deserve humanity too.