I read a 12,000-word article last week about water rights in the Colorado River basin. It took me about 45 minutes. When I finished, I felt like I understood something I had not understood before, not just the facts of the situation (which I could have gotten from a news summary) but the texture of it. The competing interests, the historical decisions that created the current mess, the human stories of the people caught in the middle. I could feel the weight of the problem in a way that a 1,200-word news piece could never achieve.

That article was published in a magazine, which is where most long-form journalism lives these days. But at ScrollWorks, we believe there is a case for publishing long-form journalism in book form, between actual covers, and we have been acting on that belief. I want to explain why, because I think the argument is stronger than most people in publishing realize.

First, let me define what I mean by long-form journalism. I am talking about deeply reported, narrative non-fiction that goes beyond the daily news cycle to explore a subject with the kind of depth and nuance that requires space. We are talking about pieces that range from 10,000 to 100,000 words. At the shorter end, they are magazine features. At the longer end, they are books. The sweet spot for what we publish at ScrollWorks is somewhere in the middle: book-length journalism, typically 50,000 to 80,000 words, that tells a single story or explores a single subject with sustained attention.

The case for this kind of work is, at its core, an argument about attention. We live in an information environment that is optimized for speed and brevity. News articles are getting shorter. Social media posts are getting shorter. Video content is getting shorter. The entire architecture of online media is designed to deliver information in quick, digestible bursts, because that is what the attention economy rewards. Every platform is competing for your time, and the way they compete is by making their content easier and faster to consume.

I understand why this is happening, and I do not think it is entirely bad. Quick, accessible information serves important functions. But there are subjects that cannot be meaningfully addressed in 800 words or a three-minute video. Complex problems, systemic issues, historical patterns, stories that involve multiple perspectives and competing interests: these require space. They require the kind of sustained, patient reporting that takes months or years to complete, and they require a reader who is willing to give them the time they demand.

A book provides that space in a way that no other format does. A magazine article, even a long one, has to compete with other articles in the same issue for the reader’s attention. An online piece has to compete with everything else on the internet, which is essentially everything. A book creates a self-contained environment. When you pick up a book, you are committing to spending time with a single subject. The physical object itself, its weight, its pages, its covers, communicates a seriousness of intent. The author is saying: I spent a long time on this. The reader is saying: I am willing to spend a long time with it. That mutual commitment is rare and valuable.

Let me give you a concrete example of why format matters. A few years ago, I read two pieces about the same subject: the opioid crisis in a specific Appalachian community. One was a 4,000-word magazine article. The other was a book-length account, roughly 70,000 words. The magazine article was well-written and informative. It gave me the key facts, quoted several local sources, and painted a vivid picture of the situation. It was a perfectly good piece of journalism.

The book did something different. It spent its first 50 pages on the history of the community before the crisis: the industries that sustained it, the families that had lived there for generations, the churches and schools and local institutions that gave it shape. By the time the opioid crisis entered the narrative, I understood the community as a place with a past, not just a problem with a location. The people affected were not case studies. They were people I felt I knew, because the author had taken the time to introduce them properly.

The middle section of the book traced the crisis itself, not as a single narrative but as a web of overlapping stories. The doctor who prescribed the pills. The pharmaceutical sales representative who marketed them. The local pharmacist who noticed the surge in prescriptions and tried to raise an alarm. The first families to be affected, and the slow, painful process by which the community recognized what was happening. The author followed these threads over years, conducting hundreds of interviews and reviewing thousands of pages of documents. The depth of reporting was evident on every page.

The final section dealt with the community’s response, the failures and partial successes of recovery programs, the legal battles, the ongoing struggle. It did not offer neat solutions or uplifting conclusions. It ended with the situation still unfolding, which felt honest in a way that a tidy ending would not have.

None of this could have been accomplished in a magazine article. The article I read about the same subject was like a photograph of a landscape. The book was like spending a month living in that landscape. Both had value, but the book left me with an understanding that the article could not match.

Now, let me address the obvious question: who is the audience for this kind of work? In an age of shrinking attention spans and infinite entertainment options, who is going to spend 10 or 15 hours reading a deeply reported book about a single subject?

The honest answer is: fewer people than I would like. Book-length journalism does not sell in the volumes of commercial fiction or celebrity memoirs. Our non-fiction titles at ScrollWorks typically sell in the low thousands, which is modest by mainstream publishing standards. But the readers who do engage with this work are remarkably loyal and passionate. They buy multiple copies to give as gifts. They recommend the books aggressively to friends and colleagues. They write long, thoughtful reviews. They attend events and ask substantive questions. They care about the subjects, and they are grateful when someone takes those subjects seriously enough to spend years reporting on them.

I have come to think that the audience for long-form journalism in book form is not defined by demographics or reading habits. It is defined by curiosity. There are people in every age group, every income bracket, every political persuasion, who have a hunger for deep understanding that cannot be satisfied by news summaries and hot takes. They want to know not just what happened, but why it happened, how it happened, and what it felt like from the inside. Book-length journalism serves that hunger in a way that no other form does.

There is also a preservation argument. Magazine articles and online features have a short lifespan. A magazine article is current for a month. An online piece might stay accessible longer, but it competes with an ever-growing archive of content and becomes harder to find over time. A book persists. It sits on shelves in libraries, bookstores, and readers’ homes. It gets assigned in college courses. It gets cited in other works. It remains accessible and findable in a way that digital content often does not.

This matters because the subjects addressed by long-form journalism are often subjects that need to be remembered. The opioid crisis. Environmental destruction. Political corruption. Racial injustice. Economic inequality. These are not issues that get resolved and become irrelevant. They persist, they evolve, and they need to be understood in their historical context. A well-reported book creates a record that future readers can return to, not just for the facts it contains, but for the understanding it builds.

I want to talk about the economics of publishing long-form journalism, because the economics are challenging and I think honesty about that is important. Deeply reported non-fiction is expensive to produce. The author may spend years reporting a single book. Travel, document acquisition, and research assistance cost money. The editorial process is longer and more involved than for most other types of books, because the editor is not just checking prose quality but also verifying factual claims and ensuring that the reporting meets journalistic standards (see our post about fact-checking for more on this).

At ScrollWorks, we can typically offer our non-fiction authors advances that are modest by industry standards. We compensate for this by offering a higher royalty rate than the major houses, so that if the book does well, the author benefits proportionally. But “if the book does well” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Most of our non-fiction titles earn out their advances, but they do so slowly. The economics work because we keep our overhead low, use digital printing to manage inventory costs, and take a long view of each title’s commercial life.

The long view is important. Book-length journalism often has a longer sales life than other types of books. A thriller peaks in its first few months and then fades. A deeply reported non-fiction book might sell steadily for years, driven by course adoptions, ongoing public interest in its subject, and word of mouth among readers who care about the topic. Our non-fiction backlist, including titles like The Cartographer’s Dilemma, continues to generate meaningful revenue years after publication. This long tail changes the economics significantly. A book that sells 500 copies a year for ten years has sold 5,000 copies, which is a respectable number for a small press. It just takes patience to get there.

I also want to mention something that I think gives book-length journalism an advantage over its digital counterparts, which is the absence of distraction. When you read a long article online, you are one click away from everything else on the internet. Your email is open in another tab. Notifications are pinging. The article itself might be surrounded by ads, recommended content, and other visual noise. The reading environment is hostile to sustained attention.

A book eliminates all of that. It is just you and the text. There are no hyperlinks to pull you away, no ads competing for your attention, no algorithm deciding what you should read next. This is not a trivial advantage. Research on reading comprehension consistently shows that people understand and retain more when they read printed text than when they read the same content on a screen. The reasons for this are debated (some researchers point to the physicality of pages, others to the absence of distraction), but the effect is real. If you want someone to truly understand a complex subject, giving them a physical book is one of the best ways to do it.

Some people in publishing argue that long-form journalism in book form is a dying category, that readers have moved to podcasts, documentaries, and online content for their deep-dive needs. I think this argument is wrong, or at least premature. Yes, other formats are growing. Yes, some readers who would have bought a non-fiction book ten years ago are now listening to a podcast instead. But the book offers something those other formats do not: the combination of depth, permanence, and focused attention that I have been describing. Podcasts are wonderful, but they are consumed while doing other things (driving, cooking, exercising). Documentaries are powerful, but they are constrained by runtime and production costs. Online articles are accessible, but they exist in an environment designed to pull your attention in every direction at once.

The book remains the best technology we have for delivering a sustained, complex argument or narrative to a single human mind. It has been the best technology for that purpose for centuries, and I do not think that is going to change anytime soon. What might change is the number of people who want that experience, and I am cautiously optimistic that the number is growing, not shrinking. I see evidence of this in the success of non-fiction books that tackle serious subjects with real depth. I see it in the growth of book clubs focused on non-fiction and journalism. I see it in the college students who email us saying they discovered one of our titles in a class and it changed how they think about a particular issue.

At ScrollWorks, we will keep publishing long-form journalism between covers. We will keep investing in the kind of deep reporting that takes years and costs more than it should. We will keep betting on the existence of readers who are curious enough, patient enough, and serious enough to spend real time with a real book about a real subject. We do this because we believe the work matters, and because, every once in a while, a reader tells us that one of our books changed the way they see the world. That does not happen with a tweet. It does not happen with a 90-second video. It happens with a book, and that is reason enough to keep making them. You can explore our non-fiction catalog to see the kind of work I am talking about.