We’ve been writing a lot about instant books lately and their slightly – but only slightly – slower cousins, quickies. There’s are no hard definitions for these genres, so let’s make some up.

An instant book is one released within hours or days of an event’s occurrence. A quickie might take weeks or months. Both are products of digital publication. They may be released in e-book or print on demand format or both. However, owing to the hard realities of offset printing and book distribution, short of a heroic and prohibitively expensive effort (called “crashing”), a traditional book simply cannot be published and released into store channels in less than several months after completion of the editorial and production process. That’s just a fact of life.

That’s the context in which we read about Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s fast-tracking of William Langewiesche’s account of the emergency ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. That happened in January. The book is scheduled for November. Ten months for a quickie.

Though the New York Times‘s Andrew Adam Newman describes the process as “just a blink of a book editor’s bespectacled eye,” it looks pretty glacial to a YouTube generation that knew everything it needed to know within hours of the astounding event. Sure, some of those ten months from splashdown to publication date were taken up by writing the book – something that quickie-watchers tend to overlook. Still, it plays up the immense disparity between pre- and post-digital quickies. “In the old days,” says the book’s editor Jonathan Galassi, “it would be ideally a year from delivery of the manuscript to publication, but now I’m hoping we can do books in four months.”

Alas, four months is about 119 days too long by 21st century standards, and so no matter what Farrar does to goose (awful pun intended) the Flight 1549 book along, a quickie will always be a slowie unless the publisher goes out with it as an original e-book. And some of us have real problems with traditional publishers releasing e-book originals. Farrar, Straus & Giroux being the quintessentially traditional publisher, it’s hard to know what they’re going to do if they have to publish a true quickie. But Galassi says help is on the way in the form of “measures that include editing copy electronically and streamlining design.”

RC