Hardcovers
By I hate them. Oh, you find nice old ones in used bookstores occasionally, but new hardcovers:
- Are all too big. You can’t reasonably carry a book that size around with you to read on the subway, or read it while holding it in one hand and doing something useful but dull with the other (doing dishes, brushing your hair… everyone does this, right?) What happened to small hardcover books: is ‘octavo’ the word for the size I’m thinking of? Those were great, but normal books don’t seem to be published in that size these days.
- Are generally rottenly made. New hardcovers I’ve bought in the last 10-15 years drop pages like beat-up paperbacks — you hear this nasty cracking sound when the glue breaks, and then the pages come out.
I strongly prefer paperbacks to hardcovers. The problem is that the hardcovers come out first, and first by a long, long time. I get all wrecked when a new book on current affairs comes out, because it’s current, and I want to read it now, but I don’t want to own the blasted hardcover — everything I said above, and they take up too much space on my shelves. So I don’t buy the books and then the reviews stop and I don’t remember to buy them when they finally come out in paperback. It’s worse for light reading — an author I like who writes unimportant fluff, but unimportant fluff that I’m fond of, will come out with a new book, and I’ll spend a year tapping my foot and checking my watch until the paperback comes out. And then I read the silly thing in an hour and a half and think “I waited a year for this?” It takes all the joy out of it.
I know why publishers schedule the long wait for the paperback (or I think I do); they want the impatient customer to buy at the higher price point. And that’s fair: I’m willing to spend more money to satisfy my impatience. But I hate spending more money to buy the book in a physically significantly less desirable format. Couldn’t they release the paperback simultaneously at a higher price, and drop the price a year out? I’d be happier. (Also at Unfogged.)