Mining the Literary Middle Ground

Byliner

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Starting in the fall of 2010, a new world began rising of shorter, digital e-texts aimed at readers with little time, attention and a big taste for reading. These works are short books or long essays and are often called ‘long-form’ stories (Timpane 2011).  Byliner is a social networking site and digital publishing company which specialises in these works of fiction and non-fiction and is part of a recent trend in renewed interest in long-form, fuelled, in part, by blogging and short news articles becoming the “genre du jour” (People’s Insights 2011). But what happened within the publishing industry to trigger this ever-growing trend? Most importantly, innovations in new technologies and business processes have disrupted the traditional models and methods of publishing, rendering old models obsolete (Kaye and Quinn 2010, p. 19). In other words, traditional models of publishing have broken down due to developments in technology such as e-readers and apps, and also due to the present recession, which “speeded up the process exponentially” (Kaye and Quinn 2010, p.19).  However, John Tayman, Chief executive Officer, viewed this as an opportunity to innovate rather than a threat to the industry he knew so well. Thus, he began to develop a number of business models to work alongside these economic and technological changes; for example, aggregation and distributed media.

Bessant and Tidd say: “Innovation is driven by the ability to see connections, to spot opportunities and to take advantage of them […] for example, by exploiting radical new breakthroughs in technology” (2011, p.7). Byliner does so through being not just a publisher but “a hybrid between a publisher and a site that enables social interaction around content” (Heddaya 2012). Byliner not only exploits developments in social media to create a customer base, but a radical development in e-text formatting pioneered by Amazon: the E-single.

Bessant, J. R. and Tidd, J. (2011) Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2^nd Edition. Chichester: John Wiley.

‘Byliner.com’. (2012) People’s Insights Vol. 1, Issue 5. MSL Group. 3 February. [Online] Available from: http://blog.mslgroup.com/byliner-com-peoples-insights-volume-1-issue-5/ [Accessed 16 March 2012].

Heddaya, M. (2012) ‘A Discussion With Byliner’. American Circus. 23 February. [Online] Available from: http://www.amcircus.com/arts/a-discussion-with-byliner.html [Accessed 23 March 2012].

Kaye, J. and Quinn, S. (2010) Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business models, strategies, issues and trends. New York; Oxford: Peter Lang.