Say what you will about Tina Brown—She destroyed the New Yorker! She saved the New Yorker!—and say what you will about her Huffington Post challenger the Daily Beast . I think this is a really great idea for magazines and books and publishing media in general:

Beast Books—as it's being called—will crank its books out in a shorter period of time to capitalize on people's shorter interests in a topic. As opposed to big blow-out books that run three hundred pages and take over a year to report, write, and edit, these will be only be around 150 pages. Think of them as really long magazine stories.

The books will first be published as e-books and then as "real" books. The long delay between writing and publication has been killing publishing for a decade now, and short, crappy magazine writing has been killing magazines for about the same amount of time. I think the idea of a quickly-published novella-length magazine story is a really great, promising idea.