Maggie's Farm

Since the paperback was invented and became instantly popular, back in the 1930s IIRC, people have been trying to kill it off. Publishers don't like it, because it's cheap and immediately became popular, and later, because it outstripped sales of hardcover books and required longer press runs than their beloved prestige fiction. Hardcover press runs initially were about 1500-1800 copies. Paperback runs were double that. Eventually, paperbacks were popular enough that their sale covered the publishers' print costs not only for fiction, but for non-fiction. Shameful. No matter how cheap and poorly executed the cover art was, the "penny-dreadfuls" of the early 20th century sold well enough to support the publishing costs of their more elegant hardcover brethren. Oh, the embarrassment.

Marianne

Sorry XRay ... I thought I was posting to the general links page. Since I made my living writing words for money, I've always been interested in the ins and outs of publishing. The subject I was addressing was how popular the ebooks like Kindle are, really, and how useful they are to the general reader in his/her busy life. And will they make words in ink on paper obsolete.
I remember when the first publisher put out paperbacks back in the late 1930s. He called them Pocketbooks and they were to help busy workers who commuted to work to alleviate the boredom of public transportation. I don't think anyone realized how popular the paperbacks would become. The low prices didn't hurt either.
The first publishers of paperbacks thought of them as very temporary, figuring they would be thrown away as soon as the buyers finished reading them. Wrong. I know that folks like me clung to the paperbacks they enjoyed and shelved them to reread. When I moved down to Texas to marry my husband, I brought all my paperbacks with me, and that was forty years ago. I still have some of them from back in the 1950s. I haven't counted the number of paperbacks I have, but in 2001, when we were flooded, I carefully boxed my favorites and saved most of them.
I had tried the Kindle and rejected it, partly because they are heavier than the average paperback, and awkward for arthritic hands to hold. Also, there is the question of ownership and privacy. When I buy a paperback, or a hardback for that matter, it's a simple transaction. The seller doesn't know and can't interfere if i throw it away, keep it, or sell it to someone else. Early on, when Amazon began to sell the Kindle, a question of copyright came up on one of George Orwell's books which they had sold to a young man who was writing a term paper on Orwell. I don't know how Amazon worked it, but they reached through the air waves and took back the book, to comply with the copyright. The only problem was, they took the young researcher's reading notes for his term paper and then lost them.
This offended me in several ways. The poor guy was going to have to try to dredge up his memory of his notes and rewrite them. He had already paid for the book. Amazon probably made restitution, but the point is, they invaded a customer's privacy. It reminded me of the naughty old story about the Madam of a brothel, who said "Such a business. You got it, you sell it and you still got it."
But in this case, you don't. And that bothers me.

Marianne