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Publish and be doomed? The digital revolution is in fact giving books and music a beautiful new life The most fetching book I’ve come across for ages wasn’t in a traditional bookshop but on a recent visit to the South London Gallery in Peckham. It was Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, but not the Penguin Popular Classic. This one was pale pink and as big as a box , newly typeset, accompanied by 30 gorgeous illustrations and available at the very reasonable hardback price of £16.99. Even as the big beasts of publishing struggle, and their traditional retailers lurch from crisis to crisis, there are reasons to be hopeful. Some publishers are doing well by producing objects beautiful enough to be collectible. That Vanity Fair I saw is from Four Corners Books , a tiny east London publisher with two employees; as well as new books, Four Corners knocks out “Familiars” by inviting contemporary artists to create fresh editions of classic novels and short stories. In music, independent stores like Rough Trade East in London and Truck Store in Oxford have begun to reverse the tide of closures. Shops like this sell themselves on the expertise of their staff, and live events, but much of the trade they do is in vinyl as beautifully produced artwork rather than invisible download. For some years, sales of old-fashioned vinyl albums have been growing steadily on both sides of the Atlantic, while CD sales fall through the floor. This new publishing ecosystem is brimming with exotic minutiae in the most unusual places. Even when publishers are working online, they’re learning to produce things in different shapes and sizes. As music is produced for digital storage, songs are expanding beyond the three-minute limit. And with the ebook , the definition of a book is becoming more fluid. Take Amazon’s Kindle Singles outlet – a showcase for nonfiction between 10,000 and 30,000 words, capable of being read in a few sittings. Publishing like this might put paid to the padding out – or squeezing – of ideas into the 70,000 words of a traditional book. It can certainly be quicker and more responsive than conventional publishing. Only two days after the story broke of Greg Mortenson’s alleged embellishment of his memoir Three Cups of Tea , a tiny online publishing company called Byliner published a short ebook by an investigative journalist presenting the case against Mortenson. Three Cups of Deceit was downloaded 50,000 times in its first three days. Just as Rolling Stone inspired a new kind of narrative nonfiction in the 1960s and 70s, this kind of publishing might be the catalyst for new kinds of writing and literary forms – all as lovingly edited and worked on as the traditional book, but with a price to match the meal. Kindle Singles sell for justa few dollars, a fraction of the cost of a full-length book. But it isn’t only the book that is changing its form. Many of us, it turns out, don’t want to spend all our time consuming random gobbets of electronic information. We’re hungry for longer things to get our teeth into – as new things sprout up in different shapes and sizes, our diet is growing more diverse. The same people who snack on bite-sized nuggets of online video at work might revel in a long HBO serial like The Wire an episode at a time in the evening, a richer story than anything they’re likely to encounter on mainstream TV. Just as novels evolved in the 19th century to cope with the demands of newspaper serialisation, television is liberating itself from stale old formats and stretching out into sprawling, more intricate kinds of story. It’s hardly a coincidence that the concept album, that creature of the 1970s, is making a comeback. When everything is granulated into digital bits, some bands have discovered, lavish and involved storytelling becomes even more important as a way of holding everything together. The future may belong to grand operatic conceits and epic, gravity-defying feats of storytelling that defy traditional categorisation. Rather than being written out of history, books and music may only be getting brand new containers, and some beautiful new wrapping. Publishing James Harkin guardian.co.uk