Impatience Has Its Reward: Books Are Rolled Out Faster

While the television industry has begun catering to impatient audiences by releasing entire series at once, the book business is upending its traditional timetable by encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace.

The practice of spacing an author’s books at least one year apart is gradually being discarded as publishers appeal to the same “must-know-now” impulse that drives binge viewing of shows like “House of Cards” and “Breaking Bad.” “Consumers want to be able to binge-read or binge-watch,” said Christine Ball, the associate publisher of Dutton. “We wanted to give the consumers what they wanted in this case.”