Interstitial Publishing | The Scholarly Kitchen

Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with text messages and meetings and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That%u2019s a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive. This point was brought to mind by the frequent complaint of being stuck for an hour or more in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out an iPhone and check mail, alerts, and Web sites! But a user in this situation could have been reading formally published material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for" to slip between the interstices of the day. Trade publishers have begun to study this, and the Wall Street Journal dedicated a feature story to the emerging practice.