The Mueller report is now officially out, and people across the world finally have the chance to sit down and find out exactly what special counsel Robert Mueller has learned about President Donald Trump after all these months of investigation. You can sit down and scroll through the PDF at your leisure, perhaps running a word search through the document for issues you’re particularly curious about (Russia? Pee tape?) — but here you’ll run into some problems. The Mueller report is 448 pages long, and not a word of it is immediately searchable. It’s going to be tough to parse it for the information that’s relevant to you.
Publishers are racing to turn the Mueller report into a book
It takes months to publish a book. Publishers want to turn the Mueller report around in one week.
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
That’s where book publishers come in. In March, when it was announced that the Mueller report was complete, Melville House, Scribner, and Skyhorse all committed to putting out copies of the report as soon as possible after the Department of Justice made it public. And their editions will be formatted and readable, with searchable text in the ebooks.
It’s not unusual for multiple publishers to put out editions of government reports. There was a similar scrimmage over the Starr report and the 9/11 Commission Report. That’s because major government reports consistently occupy an ideal position for publishers. There is a built-in readership of people interested in reading the reports after hearing them debated heavily in the news, and they are automatically in the public domain, so anyone can publish an edition without having to pay royalties. It’s a high-reward and comparatively low-investment proposition.
And publishers are arguing that the Mueller report is an especially vital document for Americans to read.
“This report is the most important document coming out of the US government since the 9/11 report,” Tony Lyons, the publisher of Skyhorse, told Vox over email in March. “Every American, whether they are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, should read it carefully.”
“The Mueller report is the most anticipated investigative document of this century, and its findings are of vast importance to the United States and to the rest of the world,” said Nan Graham, senior vice president and publisher of Scribner, in a press release.
Since the report will be in the public domain, few people will actually have to buy it as a book to read it. If you have internet access, you’ll be able to go online and read it for free — but like the Mueller report, most government reports aren’t formatted to be user-friendly. And that, publishers say, is why their editions are so important and why they consistently sell so well.
“Sure, read it for free online if you can,” said Dennis Johnson, publisher of Melville House, when I spoke to him in March. “Our feeling is, nobody does.”
There is data to support that feeling. Industry tracker NPD BookScan says the 9/11 Commission Report was published in 28 different print editions, all of which sold a combined 1.17 million copies. (BookScan does not track electronic sales, so there were almost certainly more copies of the report sold as ebooks.) That’s 1.17 million people who could have read the report for free but opted to buy a book version instead.
Publishers argue that their editions are exponentially easier to read than the editions the government puts out for free. “They [the government] don’t want you to read it,” Johnson opines.
“Personally, I like printed books, well-designed and professionally produced, rather than a pile of paper,” says Lyons. “As far as the ebook version, it’s difficult to read a manuscript online unless it’s been properly formatted.”
But getting that properly formatted book out to the public is not an easy task.
Planning to publish a government report requires dealing with a host of unknowns
The quest to publish a copy of the Mueller report has become an arms race of sorts, with each publisher scrambling to put together its own edition of the report as quickly as possible.
Although each publisher listed a release date weeks ago, all of them are quick to admit that those dates were dummies. When they announced their respective editions, they had no idea when those editions would actually come out. But they did have goals.
Melville House is aiming to have its edition — a low-cost mass market paperback plus an ebook — out within 10 days of the drop. Skyhorse is shooting for a six- to seven-day turnaround for its edition, which will feature a foreword by emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. And Scribner says it expects to release its edition, with an introduction from Washington Post reporters Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky, within two or three days as an ebook and five to eight days as a paperback.
That is a much, much shorter timeline than is traditionally required to produce a book. Skyhorse has a reputation for putting books out rapidly — “They specialize in getting books out quickly and on the shelves,” Skyhorse author Jerome Corsi told Talking Points Memo in March — but a one-week turnaround is moving fast even for them. Tony Lyons declined to say how long production usually takes at Skyhorse, but commented, “Needless to say, it usually takes much, much longer” than the planned timeline for the Mueller report.
Johnson says that at Melville House, the editorial and production process combined usually take about 18 months, which also gives the sales team time to put the word out about the book. Once a book is completed, copy edited, and typeset, he says, it takes a month to print and then another month to distribute. In this case, the entire process is happening in 10 days.
But all of these timelines depend upon a plethora of variables that publishers had no way to plan for.
We now know that the Mueller report is a scanned PDF, meaning that you can’t just use your mouse to copy and paste the text into a new document. That is exactly what Johnson told me he was hoping wouldn’t happen.
Johnson pointed to The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture, which Melville House published as a book in 2014. “The torture report was released on a Friday afternoon in a barely readable JPEG,” he says. “It was a slow and painful process to extract it … and then we had to go over that text line by line.”
That report was also heavily redacted, Johnson says, and “there is no way to typeset a redaction.” Melville House had to set the report’s black redaction bars into their pages by hand. The Mueller report is also redacted, and features plentiful black bars that will have to be set by hand.
And although we now know that the Mueller report is just under 450 pages, when publishers announced their editions, they had no idea how long the Mueller report will be. That meant they couldn’t estimate firmly exactly how long it would take to publish, and they also couldn’t set a firm price for the book.
Skyhorse currently has a price listed of $12.99 for the paperback and $7.99 for the ebook. “We hope this will be the final pricing,” Lyons says. “If the document is much shorter or much longer, we may have to adjust.”
Melville House is listing the price as $9.99 for the paperback and $1.99 for the ebook. “We hope to go down,” Johnson says. “We pray we don’t have to go up.”
Each publisher is setting a different price point for the book
You may have noticed that all of these publishers are projecting different prices for what is essentially going to be the same book. (Scribner declined to discuss its editorial process with Vox, but it is currently listing its edition at $15 for the paperback and $7.99 for the ebook.) How is that possible?
Part of the pricing discrepancy depends on what each publisher plans to add to their edition: Both Scribner and Skyhorse will have to pay their introduction writers, while Melville House is choosing to publish the report by itself without any additional material. Scribner seems to be betting that trust in the Washington Post is high enough to establish its edition as the premium Mueller report experience, thus justifying the $15 price point. Skyhorse, in the meantime, is standing by its Dershowitz foreword. “The foreword by Professor Alan Dershowitz by itself will undoubtedly be worth the price of admission,” Lyons says.
Additionally, these publishers are all planning to release the report in different formats. Scribner and Skyhorse both appear to be planning to release their editions as trade paperbacks, with generous margins and widely spaced, easy-to-read print. But Melville House is breaking with tradition to release its edition as a mass market paperback, the cheapest format in publishing, with the text set closely together to save paper. It will be the first mass market paperback Melville House has put out in history.
“We consider it our civic duty,” Johnson says. “This is the people’s version of the book. It’s going to be as inexpensive as possible.”
What we can be certain of is that now that the Mueller report is public, it will be available as a book at some point in the future. You can preorder any of these three copies from bookstores now.
Update: This story was originally published on March 26, 2019, before the Department of Justice committed to releasing the Mueller report. The article has been updated to note that the report has now been released.
