In a volatile world, the immediacy of electronic publishing means it can react to events in a matter of weeks rather than months
It usually takes months, even years, for a writer's work to make it into a reader's hands, through proofing and typesetting the work, and fitting into production, publication and sales schedules. In the case of nonfiction in particular, this can render books behind the times, or even irrelevant, by the time they hit the shelves.
The same cannot be said of Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple's Discordia. Written late this summer, the book covers the aftermath of the protests against austerity in Greece, and the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party. The final chapter describes events at the 17 September Occupy Wall Street anniversary protest in New York, where Crabapple was arrested. On 26 September Athens erupted with protest again, and on 1 October, Discordia was available for download.
This is journalistic writing of the extended, inquiring kind that newspapers can afford to do ever less of but which books have always been too slow to respond to fully. Random House's Brain Shots imprint, which is behind Discordia and a number of digital-only, nonfiction essay titles, previously published Dan Hancox's Kettled Youth, an analysis of the 2010 student protests which came out to the backdrop of last summer's riots.
As well as responding faster, these books allow writers to prototype new, or revive old, forms of writing. Discordia is a combination of Penny's words and Crabapple's illustrations: a once common form in journalism, as Paul Mason points out in his introduction. The 25,000-word length, says Penny, "gave me the opportunity to really stretch out and be more literary with the prose, while doing at-length interviews with contacts from whom soundbites would never be sufficient". It also gives journalists "the opportunity to try something new and more rigorous, the form itself changing the content".
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