TS: Hardbacks vs. Paperbacks

My eyes are fine now, so not an issue. Hardbacks are nearly always bigger and heavier, which is a drawback on the move, when you are standing on the tube say, but they are easier to hold open in readable fashion with one hand.

I've never had any kind of depth perception/stereo vision, so page hump has never bothered me (or is something I've ever noticed), it was part of learning to read I guess.

I'm beginning to think I feel a little too strongly about this.

I think you've probably got your answer.

And I think I might actually prefer such hardcovers to paperbacks, even.

Ding ding ding!

I also leave dust jackets at home on the shelf, and put them back on when I'm done reading. Mostly because I shove books into my tote-/handbags on the train and would tear them all up otherwise. Trace, I'll have to look up the Origins of the Dust Jacket later, unless someone else gets to it first. I've got bits of info bouncing around my head but can't confirm any of it.

I like both fairly equally - I lend a lot of books out and hardcovers are durable and so better for that. Paperbacks are more portable and I don't feel bad about cracking their spines so much. But if I have the choice between a paperback and a remaindered hardcover, I take the hardcover.

I can tell I'm missing out by only having the paper back of this. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375703764/103-6599196-8673456?v=glance&n=283155
Among other things (colour, I believe) the hardback has 27 more pages.

I didn't even believe the color thing mentioned in the opening, since every copy I saw had the same color situation, but then I saw a colorless edition. Bah.

it is for jordan -- i don't think her book made paperback for two years.

the only instance i can think of where the hardcover has followed the paperback: david berman's actual air

x-post

did recently buy The Algebraist in hardback because it was cheaper in the remaindered bookshop for the HB than it was in whsmith for the paperback. didn't get more than 20 pages in on the first attempt though.

(yeah, i stopped with the algebraist because i bought something else more interesting (but can't remember what). the whole of feb has been spent catching up on comics so i'll give it another go. see also that 700pp hardback of Son Of The Circus i abandoned 5 years ago)

I mean seriously, the number of times I've read a review and thought, yes, I will read that when it comes out in paperback and then forgotten about it in the intervening year. I never thought I'd say this, but surely publishing can get its act together like the film industry has done with bringing DVD releases closer to theatrical. Jackasses.

Good heavens, no, it's much too profitable to leave a good bit between pub dates, especially if the hardcover sales are still healthy. After all, if people will buy the book for $29.95, why offer them a version that's only $15.99?

My point then is are hardcover sales still healthy? I think they would make more money in more units sold if they raised the price of new paperbacks for the first year or so. Well, they'd make more money off me.

They spend all this money on marketing precisely when only a fraction of the book-buying public are interested. This seems crazy.

Also dud: inferior paperback versions, e.g. London Orbital by Iain Sinclair with a crap new cover and no photographs whatsoever.

Schools and libraries pretty much ALWAYS buy hardcovers. They do buy some paperbacks later on too but usu they also have it in HC already. For the rest, it depends on your audience for the book: hundreds of thousands of people would still buy the new Sandra Brown or James Patterson or Stephenie Meyer vampire romance even if they were printed on linoleum and sewn together with rawhide -- hardcovers don't faze them a bit -- but those people can afford HCs, and will probably read 'em at home in bed at night, not be carrying an 800-page hardcover around in their handbags.

Speak for yourself. I always have at least one hardback in my manbag for the commute to work. I find that you can just lay it open on one hand and turn pages with the other, of course it does help that I have hands like shovels (accompanied unfortunately by wrists like a girl's) The advantage of a hardback is that you can open it and it stays on that page.

upscale North American paperbacks (in my experience)are nice, well sized things that are usually well bound, printed on acid free paper and often have stitched bindings. UK paperbacks are cheaper and much horribler and are glued together and printed on horrible pulpy paper that makes the text bleedy and difficult to read. they are not worth keeping once you have finished them.

US Paperbacks>>> US Hardbacks>>> UK Hardbacks>>>>>>>∞ UK Paperbacks.

paperback books are the only things i can think of that are significantly more expensive in the US than the UK but i would be happy to pay more if the UK publishers started making them better.

Do judge a book by its cover

Patrick Ness laments the trend for drab covers, poor paper and bad design

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/dec/02/featuresreviews.guardianreview1

Why size matters

Cheap and chunky or lots of classy white space? Honor Wilson-Fletcher unpicks format and feel in part two of our series on the book business

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/aug/11/gettingpublished

You're absolutely right about the build quality of UK books. They're terrible. If I'm buying a book that I know I'll want to hold onto then I order it from Amazon.com whether it's hard or softcover.

In our defence, UK scifi cover art is very occasionally less excruciating than US.

(although now I come to look for them, I'm struggling to find any examples)

The Iain M Banks sci-fi line was very well designed, the covers were MUCH to be preferred to those of his books that made it out in the US at the time.

UK hardbacks are shit. I think we talked about this on another thread in the past.

I'm generally a paperback dude. especially those classy paperbacks with, like, rough fronts and French flaps and all that jazz -- rowr!

am I right in thinking that there's very little difference in production cost between hardback and paperback? Boo to that. I especially like the dust jacket-less hardbacks (with illustration printed directly on the cover), but I like a nice plain hardcover with the dust jacket removed too. Although I don't have enough money to have much of a say in the matter, since almost all of my inessential book-buying is charity shop. I usually don't get much pickier than trying to avoid budget paperbacks, for reasons both good (poor public domain translations, a million words crammed into every page) and bad (ugly/cheap-looking cover design; see: Wordsworth Classics, Dover Thrift).

on the one hand, i love paperbacks because they're easier to read in bed, lighter to carry round in bags (even if the difference is marginal), and the lesser value (i mean more 'aesthetic' value, or accumulating value, not what i paid for them) makes me care less about damaging them.

but i love the look of HCs, and the materiality, the design, the feel of books, are all v v important things to me. also, i collect true firsts of as many of my favourite books/authors as i can reasonably afford, and these are almost always HCs.

i went through period of "hardback only" and would wait for remainders if I couldn't afford the $30; I still sometimes do this, but the production quality of paberbacks in the US has gotten very good and some of them are very nice indeed.

I love the McSweeney's published hardbacks with the designed covers (although I don't really care for the majority of the books. But Stephen Donaldson's "I", for instance, is a really lovely looking book).

The production quality of hardcovers isn't necessarily that good anymore anyway -- almost nothing is sewn, either Symth- or side-, anymore; hardcover bindings are no different than PB ones except for being stuck into hard-sided cases. And no one uses acid-free paper anymore so even a $30 book will age awfully and be yellow in a few years.

dover thrift have some of the best cover designs

the mcsweeney's really are quite beautiful - enough so that i don't even care about the content!

what about slipcases? i love almost anything that comes in a slipcase.

I prefer hardcover`

I love the McSweeney's published hardbacks with the designed covers (although I don't really care for the majority of the books. But Stephen Donaldson's "I", for instance, is a really lovely looking book).

― akm, Tuesday, September 16, 2008 7:09 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

OTM. especially the hardcover of Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper.

http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/avclub_review3171.article.jpg

not sure how well the picture conveys it, but that image is printed right on the cover, with the roses in this wonderful metallic red color -- it's easily one of the most beautiful books I own, and I would've easily paid twice as much for it. oh, and it's a really good book, too.

http://swingleydev.com/blog/wp-content/childrens_hospital_lg.jpg

similarly lovely (and also excellent)

I know Picador UK has just started releasing hardbacks and paperbacks simultaneously, with the hardback print run being quite small for collectors/libraries/the confused.

American (non-mass-market) PBs often look very nice, but have those weird curly covers from cheapo matt varnish that contracts more than the cardboard underneath.

I rant about covers and book design frequently elsewhere, for what it's worth.

"the confused"

the mcsweeney's really are quite beautiful - enough so that i don't even care about the content!

This is the point on which civilisation collapses.

For purposes of reading, rather than just displaying on the shelf or admiring the cover/dust jacket, it's paperback all the way...until, inevitably, the spine gives out and leaves you with two cursedly incomplete books, each missing a cover and guaranteed to shed another page every week.

American (non-mass-market) PBs often look very nice, but have those weird curly covers from cheapo matt varnish that contracts more than the cardboard underneath.

It's not necessarily cheapo, you jerk, it's a perfectly reasonable option. The only reasons to go with a heavy plastic film that is the next step "up" would be if the cover has heavy ink coverage in dark colors, or metallic inks with bad adhesion, or some other special quality. Which is not most books.

And it's not that the varnish contracts, it's that the paper EXPANDS when exposed to humidity.

To alleviate some of my ever-worsening storage problem...crisis...I boxed up a few hundred paperbacks that go back to when I was still in high school, up to maybe 10 years ago, when I basically stopped buying them (pocketbooks, I mean, not trade paperbacks). For a long time, when I didn't have any money, that was pretty much all I bought, and I bought anything and everything. "Oh, I'll read that one day."

Putting them away today, did I really think that? That later in life, I'd devote almost every waking hour to reading Greek drama and obscure philosophy and '50s sociology and canonical literature? (I read maybe 10% of what I bought at the time.) I mean, I haven't abandoned the idea completely, but the clock's ticking, and I don't see it happening. I did put aside Sontag's Against Interpretation and Morton and Lucia White's The Intellectual Versus the City, which Christgau mentions in his memoir.

i can't decide which are better for throwing across the room

Weighing exercise-value vs. risk-assessment, probably paperbacks are the way to go.

hardback = pono

I buy almost exclusively used hardbacks. Somewhere around 2200 volumes about. Handsome on the shelves, no more expensive than used paperbacks, and in a few cases, they've been collectable enough to fund another season's reading.

I was once surprised when hardcovers turned out to be more poorly constructed than paperbacks, but it happens all the time. I have plenty of 40-50 year old paperbacks with essentially nothing wrong with them.

Definitely feeling what you wrote though, clemenza - I look over my books and wonder when and whether I will ever get around to so many of them. One thing, I suspect the occasional infusion of tragic greek drama might be more fun that Sontag (rhymes with drag).

this is the worst antiquated publishing practice. fuck hardbacks. i resent being punished for anticipating a book and buying a first run copy by having to carry around some heavy bullshit hard cover unyielding brick

otm it feels very antithetical to 2015, a hardback should be the equivalent of a collector's edition vinyl that gets released to fans a few months after the itunes digital album

Funny coincidence bcz I went quickly to that bkshop on Sloane Sq, they used to have a healthy supply of used paperbacks 'back in the day'. But yesterday it was mostly used hardbacks, asked the girl whether they had given up on paperback. She larfed and sadly confirmed it as they do 1st hand paperbacks. I was going to say they had always done this as long as I had been going there but its not as if arguing was going to do anything.

The one hardback I have (given to me by an ilxor) is of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai which is one of my favourite novels of the last 20 years. I really do treasure that. Otherwise there are many beautiful paperback editions.

I buy almost exclusively used hardbacks. Somewhere around 2200 volumes about. Handsome on the shelves, no more expensive than used paperbacks

Where is this paradise where used hardbacks are more expensive than used paperbacks?

sorry 'NO more expensive'.

otm it feels very antithetical to 2015, a hardback should be the equivalent of a collector's edition vinyl that gets released to fans a few months after the itunes digital album

― lex pretend, Saturday, March 21, 2015 7:56 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

These do exist but only after the regular HC has run out its life and probably so has the PB and doing a slipcased special edn is a way to continue milking the content without investing more $$ into development. And they cost lots more than the original.

it's just like, you should have the choice

it's all music man

xyzzz in both my local oxfams hardbacks cost less!

(Mostly commercial fiction tbf)

Yeah, I sold second-hand books for about five years, and hardback fiction - especially popular hardback fiction - was MUCH more difficult to sell than their paperback equivalents, and often sold for less than a pound in the end. Yet at the same time, people selling them - or trying to sell them - would think they were prestige, premium items that should net them a small fortune, not the buttons I would invariably offer them. Horrendous all round, so I grew to hate hardbacks. I can see their value to libraries, still, but for anything else they're a pain in the arse.

I like a variety of lots of different designs, dimensions/sizes and materials, as long as there is no unnecessary special collector edition bullshit. Tend to prefer paperbacks but some recent hardcovers have had such beautiful designs that I want them.

I hate dustjackets though. If you're going to have artwork, put it on the damn hardcover. But some have such nice art that I keep the dustjacket.

i like the trend of that waxpapery translucent dustjacket over a colorful cover (like iq84) aesthetically but yeah f dustjackets

Even more valueless are hardcovers without their dustcovers, or book club hardcover editions (in the uk, often printed at a smaller size than the 'real' UK hardcover, and a very unpleasant physical reading experience).

Why so unpleasant?

I was going to buy Big Book Of Penis a while ago but some bastard had removed the overlay cover that had the underpants that covers the nudity underneath and I figured I might get into trouble for carrying the book to the counter with the nudity on both sides. I could have asked a staff member to cover the book and take it to the counter but I didn't want it that badly.

Where is this paradise where used hardbacks are more expensive than used paperbacks?

Internet sales, where niche market books (of the sort I'm interested in) are regularly remaindered at $0.99, eventually, regardless of whether they're HB or PB. Shipping in the US is typically 3-3.99, so the expense is largely out of the seller's control. I've little idea whether literary HBs see these price nadirs, as I'm usually buying technical books and popcorn non-fiction.

Right I avoid the internet as far as buying books goes.

xyzzz in both my local oxfams hardbacks cost less!

― sexpost TMIing! (wins), Saturday, March 21, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(Mostly commercial fiction tbf)

― sexpost TMIing! (wins), Saturday, March 21, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When I browsed the only hardback that piqued my interest was Svevo's As a Man Grows Older. Eight quid. Could come across the paperback of this for three or so.

Thread reminds me that this is hardback only:

http://www.tobypress.com/books/preliminaries.htm

:-(

I was organising my books and while I'm largely pro-paperback, I found two annoyances.

The residue from peeled off stickers kinda glues to other books and often rips the other covers when the books are pulled apart. It happens with some paper covered hardbacks too but more often with paperbacks.
I've recently made a point of always sellotaping over any sticky residue.

I don't have bookshelves (I'm usually reluctant to buy any kind of storage because I could buy more exciting stuff with that money) so when I pile up thick paperbacks (like 400 pages and over), they tend to lean and fall once the pile gets a certain height, even when stacked against a wall.

The trick there is to put enough smaller paperbacks on the top of the pile to move the centre of gravity closer to the wall.

bookshelves are a scam. stack some lengths of plywood between some cinderblocks: cheap, modular, movable, chic to the gullible. from the desk of

i have kind of a horror of vertical stacks.

in france most books don't ever come out in hardback 📚

was reading an american mass-market paperback in france recently and got a snide comment about the cover; apparently any paperback with an actual illustration/photo on it (as opposed to just black serif type on a white cover) is gauche downmarket swill for sensation-seeking rubes

I've tried to put smaller books at the top but I've got quite a lot of series books, like 25 volumes of Mammoth Best New Horror, obviously I want to keep them together.

Hmmm, that's an interesting idea, I might look for bricks and shelves and stack them but I'd be worried about them tipping.

russia seems to have a lot more pulp hardbacks. (this is going by russian sections in various western bookstores so idk.) they lack dust jackets and have lurid illustrations printed directly onto the covers, like children's illustrated classics. sometimes while the edition is pulp the book itself is some titanic 19c classic (i.e. old pulp), but all of those have the lurid illustrations printed directly onto the covers too. these and roleplaying rulebooks are the only hardbacks i fuck with.

academic publishing wouldn't know what to do with itself if hardbacks went away, couldn't rightly sell someone's barely edited phd thesis for £80 in paperback could you

Hmmm, that's an interesting idea, I might look for bricks and shelves and stack them but I'd be worried about them tipping.

it helps to make them wider than they are tall which your space may not support, but regardless on level ground and with three bricks a shelf, left-middle-right, this has gone pretty well for me over the years

was reading an american mass-market paperback in france recently and got a snide comment about the cover; apparently any paperback with an actual illustration/photo on it (as opposed to just black serif type on a white cover) is gauche downmarket swill for sensation-seeking rubes

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, April 6, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Gotta love the French - no half measures!

unless it's a naked woman obv

https://midite.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/vitrine-librairie-mollat-alintes.jpg

..or a representation of :-)

Well...here we are:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99293-last-call-for-mass-market-paperbacks.html

Mass market paperbacks used to be sold in wire racks at news stands, grocery stores and drugstores. Now it's mainly airports, because it's harder and harder to find a title/author/subject/cover illustration that can attract a mass of readers who'll buy a cheap paperback on impulse. That includes me I guess. All of the mass markets I buy are used, which does the publishers no good.

There was something pleasing about that size of book, especially for fiction and especially for genre fiction. I remember when they used to dye the outside of the pages different colors to indicate which genre the book belonged to. I guess they virtually gave up on this format for non-fiction long ago.

Shameless flacking for my thread ILB: Post your canonical covers here

RIP mass market paperbacks

"Jacqueline Susann’s megahit Valley of the Dolls sold 300,000 hardcovers in 1966, while the Bantam paperback sold four million in its first week on sale in 1967, and more than eight million in its first year, Margolis notes."

it's strange to remember how many people used to read books for entertainment

as our caustic JM has pointed out, the art/design of MM paperbacks has been moribund for decades; it's little wonder that readers might prefer (even more-expensive) QPBs or ebooks

there are cliches but design is fucking important!

also maybe this should be moved to i love books

You'd have to start a new thread there. ILX isn't designed to move thread among boards.

No, threads can be moved, always has been.

(rubs hands together) Oh boy! Lots of misplaced threads out there that belong elsewhere. Only question is where to begin?

Always thought it was, if not impossible, at least frowned upon.

Lol pictured in that article is the Warren Commission report as a mass market paperback... 800 dense pages!

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/47sAAeSww3JpI1fK/s-l1600.jpg

Ha! I found a copy of that exact edition in a used bookshop last week. 'With all illustrations'

I love old MM pbs from the 1960s-1970s. It's the main thing I look for when I'm browsing these days.

mass market paperbacks were the perfect format for just keeping in your coat pocket so you could just keep reading wherever you happened to have a couple of minutes of free time. I guess this was replaced by my e-reader for me, which I drag with me pretty much everywhere. I don't actually buy many physical books anymore, which is a shame because I love them, but practicality has won out (also e-books take up way less space in my house).

Except for the occasional remaindered hardcover, couldn't afford anything except paperbacks in university. As I got older and had income, that changed. All my paperbacks were boxed up for a number of years, till I moved and was able to re-shelve them. Mostly I'll haul around hardcovers to read now. The size of paperbacks is great, but they are susceptible to falling apart.

mass market paperbacks were the perfect format for just keeping in your coat pocket so you could just keep reading wherever you happened to have a couple of minutes of free time. I guess this was replaced by my e-reader for me, which I drag with me pretty much everywhere. I don't actually buy many physical books anymore, which is a shame because I love them, but practicality has won out (also e-books take up way less space in my house).

My local branch library has a Classics section that I haunt which is at least fifty percent this format.

It's oddly or not so oddly comforting to see this books and sometimes to actually borrow and read them. And just stick them in your coat pocket or course.

So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket
(NYT)

Mass markets were not just cannibalized digitally. Readers now seem more willing to buy books in larger, pricier formats like trade paperbacks and hardcovers. [...]

“We follow the consumer,” said Dennis Abboud, the chief executive of ReaderLink. “In the case of mass markets, the consumer spoke. They were just done with it.”
[...]
Still, the format makes less and less financial sense. There is only about a 30 cent difference, Abboud said, between producing a mass market and a trade paperback of the same title — but the trade version could easily sell for $6 more.