Philip Green­spun on how writ­ing and pub­lish­ing has evolved since the Inter­net and, specif­i­cally, the blog have become omnipresent in our lives:

Sup­pose that an idea mer­ited 20 pages, no more and no less? A hand­ful of long-copy mag­a­zines […] would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be dis­trib­uted would gen­er­ally be forced to cut it down to a mean­ing­less 5-page mag­a­zine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the min­i­mum size to fit into the book dis­tri­b­u­tion system. […]

Our lit­er­ary cul­ture is impov­er­ished when every idea is stretched or ampu­tated to fit the Pro­crustean bed made up by mag­a­zine and book pub­lish­ers. When an author runs out of rel­e­vant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.

Trough the lens of what was able to be pub­lished, Green­spun sees publishing’s evo­lu­tion like this:

  • Pre-1990: five-page mag­a­zine arti­cles and 200-page books.
  • 1990 to 2000: any length essays, with lit­tle bar­rier to entry (sta­tic web pages).
  • 2000 onwards: one-paragraph ideas and per­sonal thoughts, widely avail­able (pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion) with blogs.