Books Abridged

Book publishers are agreed that more books would be sold if people had more money to buy them, more time to read them. Obvious solutions would be to make books cheaper and shorter. For most publishers either course is close to impossible. For magazine publishers who can buy the right to boil down books, the problem is not so tough.

Book Digest, published by Joseph J. White, offers for 25-c- each month three or four condensations (5,000-8,000 words) of current books, about eight shorter condensations or excerpts from other works. Book Digest pays publishers $100 for long condensations, runs no advertisements, claims 50,000 circulation. Publishers liked the idea, for they had noted increased sales of such books as Reader's Digest, pocket-size colossus, digested each month.

Next month, people who can afford to pay 50-c- for a magazine and have the time to read 30,000 word "abridgments" will be offered Omnibook, published and edited by Robert Kenneth Straus, New York City Councilman and son of Jesse Isadore Straus, late Macy store tycoon and Ambassador to France. Each Omnibook page will contain four book pages with margins trimmed. Each number will include about 100 pages from each of five books.

For permission to abridge a book, Omnibook will pay publishers $500. While the strongest objection to boiling down books comes from authors, some publishers have also balked at Omnibook's plans. Short digests, they feel, might whet a reader's appetite for the whole book; long abridgments, they suspect, might satisfy it.

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