
Why do publishers still issue hardbacks? (2018) - samclemens
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/book-clinic-why-do-publishers-still-issue-hardbacks
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tempguy9999
"The hardback is a mark of quality"

I disagree. A major mark of quality (other than the writing) is the paper it's
printed on, and the publishers often pick the poor, yellowing, easy-tearing
newsprint paper, almost newsprint quality.

Then they stick a hardback cover on it and sell it for £££.

Come on publishers, if I pay decent dosh for a book, hardback or soft, don't
skimp on this.

~~~
Iv
In France the standard became de "livre de poche" edition, the "pocket-book".
Fits well on shelves, kind of uniform format, softcover, so it is easier to
read/transport, good paper quality.

I have grown with this being the standard and to me when I see US hardcover
books at $50+ I don't understand it: it is bulky, hard to read in a cramped
place like a subway (or toilets!) No two books are the same size or color and
it is printed with so much spacing that it looks like kids books or the kind
of dissertation formatting I used to do when the teacher asked for 20 pages
and I only had 5 pages of material.

~~~
Consultant32452
I think it's that books, particularly hard backs, are in a pseudo-
artwork/collectible category. There are times I've liked a paperback so much I
bought the hard back and never opened it, just to have the "pretty" version on
the shelf.

~~~
Iv
Yes, that's a weird thing. Some books seem to be vanity items. But even in
that respect, I find the US format weird: all books are dissimilar and are
harder to fit in typical furniture.

I do prefer the look of this: [http://a52.idata.over-
blog.com/2/25/73/36/Photos/Bibliothequ...](http://a52.idata.over-
blog.com/2/25/73/36/Photos/Bibliotheque/100_1143.JPG)

to the look of this:

[https://www.archimag.com/sites/archimag.com/files/styles/art...](https://www.archimag.com/sites/archimag.com/files/styles/article/public/web_articles/image/Biblioth%C3%A8queLivres.png)

~~~
barrkel
That's comparing books by a single publisher in what looks like a very
specific series, with paperbacks from different publishers.

The former - the one you prefer - looks institutional to me, like something a
hospital or childcare home would buy in bulk, at a discount, to provide
reading material for the unfortunate inmates.

The latter has a lot more distinctiveness, and is chaotic since the book
designs individually try to grab attention, so that they sell themselves in a
bookshop. I don't particularly love the result, it's an artifact of how books
have been sold over the past century, but it's preferable to the former by
some distance. It's far easier to spot a book whose cover you know in the
second style.

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nils-m-holm
Hardcover books are a pleasure to read, especially if they are smyth-sewn. You
can identify a smyth-sewn book by placing it on a table and opening it in the
middle. If the pages stay flat on top of each other, it is. The pages of a
case-bound hardcover will separate from each other and stick out, and a
softcover book will just close and fall over.

And that is exactly why hardcover books are a pleasure to read: it takes
little effort to hold them open. A smyth-sewn hardcover you can pretty much
put on a table and leave it alone while reading it. When reading softcovers,
my fingers often get tired before my eyes do.

~~~
foobarbecue
I bought a hardcover Le Guin anthology recently after balking a bit at the
price. But then I was amazed to find it stayed open when I put it on a table
and very happy to have paid the premium! Now, thanks to you, I know there is a
name for this technology.

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pithymaxim
I always thought this was just price discrimination, extracting more surplus
from readers by bifurcating them into two groups. Hardbacks are released
first. Everyone who really wants it now needs to shell out more, even if they
don't really care about the physical properties. Then the paperback is
released to attract the more reluctant readers.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That's exactly what it is.

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ZoomZoomZoom
The question is, why would anyone want a paperback? It's clearly a format for
disposable or travel books, which are easily replaced with a digital media.
Paperback are not suitable for repeated readings and a really high-quality
paperback, if there was one, would be prisewise on par with a hardcover
anyway. I don't get paperbacks.

~~~
Xelbair
I would agree, but somehow ebooks cost same or more than paperback books...
and they also come full of DRM.

Not to mention licensing nightmares - i wanted to buy one ebook in english..
and i couldn't because someone else had rights to distribution in UK, so i
couldn't order US ebook as i was from europe. To make matters worse - UK
publisher/rightholder/whatever had no plans to even release an ebook.

~~~
beatgammit
This is it for me. If I'm going to buy a book, I'm not going to buy DRM, so my
choices end up being paperback or hardcover. I prefer to read paperback
because it's more portable, so that's what I end up buying.

If ebooks without DRM were available, I'd probably buy a lot of them. However,
DRM drastically reduces the value of an ebook for me, so they'll have to
drastically reduce the price of an ebook for me to buy (or maybe have a
reasonable rental option). Until then, I'll buy paperbacks and restrict my
ebook reading to my library and copyright-free titles.

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qwerty456127
What is harder for me to understand is why do they still use softback.
Whatever I buy - I want it to be as heavy-duty as possible. Whenever I can
choose between paperback an hardback I'm always buying a hardback unless the
price difference is too serious. I don't even see how do softbacks make any
sense to exist today when you can get an electronic book whenever weight and
production cost are among your major concerns.

~~~
beatgammit
I would _love_ to buy ebooks, but they're riddled with DRM, which makes me
feel like I'm renting instead of buying, so I just don't. Finding DRM-free
ebooks is pretty rare, so I stick to paperbacks, especially since they're
often similarly priced.

If I could reliably get DRM-free ebooks, I'd buy a ton of them.

~~~
boring_twenties
You probably already know this, but just in case: you can trivially strip the
DRM from Kindle books using the free Calibre software.

------
moultano
I stopped buying physical books for most of what I read after my last move,
but I missed having books around as decoration, conversation starters, and
things to loan or for guests to read. And I didn't want to have a bookshelf
that reflected only what I read decades ago. So now I've decided that for
anything I read that I think is among the best I've read, that I'd
unconditionally recommend to anyone, I go buy as nice a physical copy as I can
find. This keeps me from having to lug around books that I'm not especially
proud of, and leaves me with a wonderfully compact bookshelf full of things I
genuinely love.

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Animats
_" Hardbacks are also more profitable for publishers: they will often sell at
twice the price of their paperback equivalent but do not cost twice as much to
produce."_

That was a mistake of the print-on-demand machine enthusiasts. They generated
disposable paperbacks. E-readers ate that business. Now, a machine that prints
and binds good hardbacks on demand - that might be useful.

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Wowfunhappy
If I need to put a hardcover book down for a moment, I can leave it open on a
table or desk. Paperbacks won't stay open like that.

This is particularly annoying if I need to copy or reference something from a
book on a separate device of piece of paper.

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dehrmann
Same reason vinyl outsells CDs? If you just want to consume the content, there
are cheaper choices, but for something you want to save and make a statement
with, hardbacks are superior.

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Nerada
I only ever buy print in hardcover.

The last paragraph sums it up well; I'm almost solely digital now, but if
there's something I particularly enjoy, I'll hunt for the hardcover.

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__d
If I'm buying fiction from an author I know and like, that I think I'd like to
last for decades (and maybe leave to my children one day) I'll buy hardcover.
That's maybe half of my fiction purchases.

For authors or books I'm unsure of, or just trashy stuff, I'll buy Kindle.

For technical books, I'll usually try to buy non-DRM PDF or eBook from the
author, or failing that, a paperback.

I periodically (like, once a year or so) try to strip the DRM from my Kindle
collection and back it up, but I basically assume that they could disappear at
any time, so I don't trust them for anything I consider important.

I used to use an iPad2 for reading my Kindle books, but it's too slow to open
the collection now (since I have a few hundred Kindle books). I'll likely get
a Kindle reader of some sort one day, but for now I just read them on my phone
most of the time.

~~~
odysseus
Curious, do you find iBooks (Apple Books) on the iPad2 any faster at opening
books or scrolling lists of books? Or is it about the same as the Kindle app?

~~~
__d
I don't have anywhere near the same number of items in my iBooks app (only a
few PDFs actually).

Once a book is open, it's ok, but it just took 40s to open the app. That
actually seems a little quicker than it has been, so maybe Amazon has done
some work on the app.

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wdb
As book author the royalty on hardcover books were higher compared to the
softcover books. But still the ebooks were the better deal as they gave the
highest royalty. Personally, I enjoy buying nice hardcover books. The Folio
Society books are gorgeous

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bowlich
I know a of relatives who only buy hardbacks -- even if all they're reading is
one-read genre stuff.

Myself, I tend to buy paperback, read and then donate. If the book was good
and I want to keep it for my personal collection. I track down a hardcover
copy.

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heraclius
As Hyphen Press explain, hardbacks used invariably to be bound properly, but
now they are often simply paperbacks between boards.¹ Signalling alone as
above is the correct explanation. Cloth books can have practical advantages,
such as the possibility of rebinding, but modern hardbacks mostly lack them.

1\.
[https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey](https://hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/article/bookbinding_survey)

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baroffoos
Hardback books seem like a magnet for collectors (hoarders) they know they
could more conveniently get the book as an ebook or from the library but they
are buying them primarily as an item to store on a shelf. I have seen people
buy books they don't even intend to read simply because the hardback is well
decorated and the edge of the pages is gold.

Perhaps they think the sight of a large bookshelf full of books they never
read makes them look smarter. They are probably right as well.

~~~
lsaferite
Why disparage collectors by conflating them with hoarders?

I purchase books both to read and to collect if they are well-made pieces of
art.

It seems you have something against collecting such things based on how you
frame your comments though. I personally do not understand the desire to
disparage another person because you do not see value in collecting books.

~~~
baroffoos
You are correct. I am critical of the practice of collecting items that have
no continued use to the owner and would be better off sold or gifted to a new
owner who could get more use out of it.

I will admit though that they can serve as art and part of the room decoration
which is a valid usecase.

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nottorp
I'm mostly digital but i recently snatched a paperback... which reminded me
I'm growing old because the font was too small for me :)

So I guess in the future I'll get more hardbacks instead of less. They tend to
use larger fonts, and sometimes (if the paper isn't crap) even have better
contrast.

~~~
jeffwass
This depends on the book (or perhaps the publisher).

For example, I just bought the Illuminatus Trilogy in one cheap paperback, and
it’s got a _terrible_ typeface, it looks like a smeared typewriter.

But all other books I’ve bought the past couple months (mix of paperbacks and
hardcovers) have had clear typefaces. In fact I never noticed typefaces
consciously until seeing this book which takes a noticeable amount of effort
to read the fonts.

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ropiwqefjnpoa
Simple answers are, because people still buy them and they can charge more.

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cafard
My impression is that paperbacks from US publisher tend to be superior to
their hardbacks.

But for constant use such as library books get, hardbacks might hold up
better.

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xiaodai
Price differentiation. Well known theory in economics. It's like asking why do
ppl still release movies in cinemas.

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thekevan
My reason for buying them wasn't mentioned as far as I saw--I like them
better.

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mmmBacon
A good solid book printed on good paper is a joy, a gem.

