What do you think the future of the hardback book is? I'm back from my trip and in London I noticed something very odd. Brand new hardback books here are paperback there. PAPERBACK! How is that possible? Not only are they paperback, these brand new books also have on them, most of the time, "Buy one, get half off the next one." And they seem to be the same size books, there's virtually not much diference except on the paper quality and the cover, but I didn't do a detailed comparison.
I particularly noticed this in the bookstore WH Smith, which is in airports and train stations and on main streets and in department stores, (tho I'm very happy to see Blackwells in Oxford is still operating), but they seem everywhere~!
I don't understand how they do that but I sure wish they would do that here. The new Apocalypse book that they say steal this off your teenager's table, you can't put it down: only hardback here: paperback there.
Man those stores are like a magnet to me. What else have they got? I swear (but did not really look hard because I've got it at home in 90 pound hardback) the new Inferno, Dan Brown, is in paperback there. HOW do they do that? Are they abridged?
When you see that you think the future of the hardback may be quite limited. All these paperback books seem to be of a type, the same publisher. I'd like to read the new Prada book but not buying that expensive and bulky hardback, and I left before it appeared in WH Smith (it just appeared here), and for some reason I just can't seem to enjoy a book on an E reader, so I'm stuck. And here comes WH Smith with paperbacks!!!
Do the publishers here make a lot on the hardbacks so that's why they still print them? You could buy a couple of the paperback versions of the same book for one hardback and they seem identical in size, and they are so much lighter.
Along with changes to Libraries, I wonder if the hardback will be the next casualty. I bet it will.