Can you judge the contents of a book by its trim size?

The other day I read an interview with Peter Chernin, who is the number-two guy in News Corporation, the world’s leading publisher of English-language newspapers. Chernin, second only to Rupert Murdoch himself, extolled the success of MySpace.com, which News Corporation owns.

He spoke about the great changes afoot in the world of news and entertainment. With so many digital options, he pointed out, people can always have something they love; they never have to settle for “what’s on.” They can TiVo their televisions, fill their iPods with their favorite songs, and roam at will in the clickable world of the Net.

Reading Chernin’s words made me think of a distinct trend in the way nonfiction books for younger readers are being published. It used to be that you could more or less tell what a book was—who the intended readers were, what the predicted market was (school, home, library, or store)—by the format, or trim, of the book. Trim is the width-by-length measurement of the book (think 8 ½ by 11 inches, for example). When a typical editorial meeting in a publishing house came to the question “What trim do you have in mind?” the answers were predictable. Picture books were large. From there, books shrunk as their intended readers aged, settling in at a boxy 8 by 8 inches, say, for middle school nonfiction.

It is precisely that stamped-out formula for nonfiction trims that publishers are abandoning. They have begun to match the look of a book not just to a vague generalization about age and market, but also to the treatment that the author has created for its subject.

Think of Betsy Partridge’s multi-award-winning biography, John Lennon (Viking, 2005). The art director at Viking told me he modeled the trim after a Beatles album. By contrast, consider Thomas Allen’s George Washington, Spymaster (National Geographic, 2004), a history book that looks for all the world like a novel. These two books exemplify the new sense in the world of trim: if a nonfiction book is driven by its art, then that art should get real play. But if the heartbeat of a book is its writing, then it might as well look like a novel. The compromise of the past—the boxy middle—is under pressure at both ends.

It’s not just photos and words that define the new trims. At a recent convention, Adam Lerner, publisher of Sally Walker’s Secrets of a Civil War Submarine: Solving the Mysteries of the H. L. Hunley (Carolrhoda, 2005), spoke with justifiable pride about the book, this year’s Sibert Medal winner. Notice the trim—the oblong look so suited to a submarine, a look that the publisher went to great lengths to make sturdy enough to accommodate the number of pages. Though Candlewick Press’ “ology” books (such as Egyptology and Wizardology) are not exactly nonfiction, they take the marriage of trim and content even a step further. The books are meant to be artifacts of the subjects they describe.

That marriage of content and appearance is, it seems to me, the new meaning of “trim” in the world Chernin described. Trim is no longer a box or an industrial template into which every kind of biography, history, or story of discovery is poured. Instead, trim is now coming to mean “fit,” “suited,” and “appropriate.” I can’t think of a more encouraging trend in nonfiction.