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The logo for 8080 Books, a new publishing imprint from Microsoft, announced Monday. (Microsoft Image)
Microsoft will attempt to find the sweet spot between the speed of social media and the lasting impact of books with its own publishing imprint, 8080 Books — aiming to bring new titles to market much faster than traditional publishing allows.
Launching this week, the goal is “to publish original research, ideas, and insights at the intersection of science, technology, and business, and in doing so, help advance the discourse and debate,” reads the 8080 Books charter.
A typical publishing house might require six to nine months to take a book from manuscript to market, under an accelerated schedule. In contrast, 8080 Books is positioning itself to publish new titles in as little as three months once the manuscript and other materials are ready.
The imprint draws its name from the Intel 8080 processors that were the foundation for Microsoft’s early software. Whereas the longstanding Microsoft Press imprint concentrates on technical books, 8080 Books will focus on thought-leadership titles. The charter describes the initial focus as “technology and the future; business process and productivity; and societal priorities in law, ethics, and policy.”
Leading 8080 Books are Steve Clayton, Microsoft’s vice president of communications strategy, serving as publisher of the new imprint; and Greg Shaw, the 8080 Books editor, a journalist, author, and publishing industry veteran.
Microsoft says 8080 Books won’t be a profit-making venture: Any revenue generated will be invested back into the imprint’s publishing process or donated to non-profits through Microsoft Philanthropies.
Why books? Clayton and Shaw address that question directly at the outset of the 8080 Books charter: “Creating, building, and sustaining an idea or argument over tens of thousands of words while holding a reader’s interest is not the same as dashing off an email, a post, a video, or even a speech,” they write in the charter.
Under normal circumstances, tech developments often outpace the traditional book publishing industry, which can also be slow to identify the most important trends in innovation. While Microsoft won’t have the objectivity of a regular publishing house, its inside knowledge of AI, in particular, could position 8080 Books to zero in on key trends long before other publishers would.
Initially, authors are expected to come from inside and around Microsoft, but that will likely extend to people outside the company over time. Clayton and Shaw write in a blog post that they see 8080 Books “not just as a platform for Microsoft authors but also to showcase minds and ideas from outside of the company.”
The first 8080 Books release, this week, is No Prize for Pessimism: Letters from a Messy Tech Optimist by Sam Schillace, Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer.
Clayton cited Schillace’s book as an example of a title that will have additional resonance given the timeliness.
“No Prize for Pessimism” focuses on technological shifts and disruptions, encouraging younger generations to embrace innovation and entrepreneurship, even when it involves uncertainty and messiness. Schillace has seen this first-hand as a startup founder and the creator of Google Docs.
“I was very fortunate to live through the shift from the desktop to the cloud with my seat at the G-Docs table,” Schillace said. “That moment feels a lot like this moment to me, where there was a lot of skepticism, there’s a really fundamental shift in the world, and absolutely everything about the software and technology world changed all at once.”
Schillace explained, “I think it’s really important that [younger generations] understand that innovation and disruption and entrepreneurship doesn’t work in this neat, tidy way that they’ve been told.”
Clayton called it “the ideal first book” to give readers a sense for 8080 Books.
Schillace has also launched a custom GPT where readers can ask questions and have a conversation with the book, as he describes it.
The imprint’s second book is expected to be Platform Mindset by Marcus Fontoura, a former Microsoft technical fellow, about the culture of collaboration required to create a successful tech platform. It was originally published in Portuguese in Brazil under a different title, and Microsoft acquired the rights for the English version.
8080 Books is working with Ingram for print-on-demand and distribution services. Its titles will available in major retail bookstores, and independent bookstores, as well as online retailers like Amazon, as traditional books and e-books. Microsoft says 8080 Books isn’t accepting unsolicited book proposals.
Shaw, the former publisher and CEO of the Seattle-area news site Crosscut (now Cascade Public Media), also co-authored Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s 2017 book, Hit Refresh, and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s 2020 book, Reprogramming the American Dream, both published by Harper Business.
