At the A.V. Club Josh Heller writes about his one pop-culture rule: ‘no matter how often I pick them up and stroke them lovingly in the hidden corners of my local bookstore, I just cannot bring myself to purchase new hardcover books. Partly it’s the price — $25 for a freakin’ book? You’d think trees are scarce or something!—but I also can’t stand the fact that a) dust jackets, as lovely as they can be, always slip off in my hands and get ripped way too easily, and b) hardcovers are needlessly heavy and portability-challenged, especially if I’m already hauling a laptop around in my bag. But that preference for paperbacks means I’m way behind on a shitload of recent books I’m absolutely dying to read, including China Miéville’s The City And The City and Paolo Bacigalupi’s hotly tipped debut, The Windup Girl, simply because I don’t like the heft, epidermis, or price tag of hardcovers. Luckily, some publishers — including Orbit, one of my favorite purveyors of fantasy and science fiction — likes to release books directly to trade paperback, my format of choice. Of course, according to the Boing Boing set, we’ll soon be reading novels exclusively via intravenous injection, so what the fuck does it even matter?’
I'm hearing this a lot. Not just about price (which is a way of expressing lessened desire), but about the modern lifestyle and the way hardcovers just don't fit into it. I read every morning and evening on the train, and certain types of books are just awful to read; particularly, big hardcovers and old paperbacks with no thumb margins and teeny gutters. Is it time that hardcovers became the second wave? Perhaps the modern publishing model has to rely on softcover and digital editions first, with hardcover editions appearing as a collector's perk.
1 comments:
You obviously know the history of the so-called "paperback revolution"?
I do because I lived through it. In the mid-1960's, American publishers discovered that customers would buy books--unbound books, in effect--if they could be made cheaply enough. There had been a tradition of small "dimestore" paperbacks going back to the 1930's and '40's. But the so-called "quality" paperbacks (a term that I think was coined maybe in the 1980's) began to be published in significant number just about the time I was coming of age as a reader in the early 1960's. Cody's Books in Berkeley was one of the first retail bookstores that specialized in paperback books. Sather Gate Bookshop, which had sold books on Telegraph for half a century, was slowly dying. The college textbook stores, along with Cody's, thrived, as the old stores watched their clientele dissolve. Within another 15 years, the first wave of big discounters--Walden's and Crown's--had moved in to the traditional market, aggressively discounting hardcovers, and incorporating the paperback inventories as well.
Trade hardcovers have been in de facto decline for over 40 years. Middle class families which once had private libraries--holding over from the pre-television years of the 1950's and after--had given up buying hardcover books by the 1980's. And when computers arrived, the only books in the house tended to be computer texts or children's books.
There will always be a marginal place for best-sellers and topical exposes and classics and certain reference materials and the usual fluff. But general interest or limited interest hardcover books as a meaningful share of the retail book segment has been a dead issue for decades.
And now, with the arrival of e-books and institutional databases replacing material text, it's doubtful that even university presses will be able to support them. In another five-ten years, movies will debut on home televisions, and books will be downloadable to individual PC's for use on hand-carried devices (and the current inconveniences like moving among pages will be solved). That will likely spell the end of publishing as we now know it. Bookstores, like movie houses, will be dinosaurs. They'll join junk and antique shops and consortiums as purveyors of curiosities and "collectibles".
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