Scholars read books. But to be able to read books, someone has to write them. And who does that anymore? We asked Jan Mendling, an information systems and computer science researcher who wrote several successful books, to tell us about the role of books, the value of books, the publishing of books – and how we can get more people like him to become involved in business-oriented information systems research. As usual, the references to all the articles we mention are listed on http://www.janrecker.com/this-is-research-podcast/.