[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

A typical Borders has many, many trade paperbacks whose dimensions are unlike those of best sellers. They are loaded with pictures and graphs. I do not see those trade paperbacks going away in the foreseeable future.

Nor will you. I have a number of volumes in my library that simply would not work in electronic format. Most of my volumes on art, architecture, and design require large page sizes, and even though you could produce them as PDFs and retain formatting, most folks don't have screens large enough to display them as intended, and wouldn't want to read on them if they did. (I have a screen like that, and wouldn't want to.)

In regard to best sellers, CDs replaced LPs because the record companies wanted them to.

Not just wanted to. One of the questions for some time was what would replace vinyl. There was slow but steady development from the old 78rpm records to the 33 1/3 rpm LP, and in the recording and pressing technology that allowed more music and greater dynamic range to be presented on LP. But LPs presented some hard limitations, like the difficulty of getting more than about 20 minutes of music per side on an LP and maintaining sound quality. There were also cost pressures. The best LPs were made from "virgin" vinyl, but record companies tended to use a mix of virgin and recycled vinyl for lower costs. You could make better quality LPs, but save for collectors buying foreign imports, most LP buyers balked at the costs.

The CD provided for better quality, more music on a single volume, and extras like metadata provided along with the music. No surprise the industry migrated. The fact that there was a pop in sales as consumers replaced LPs with CDs didn't hurt, but it wasn't the point of the exercise. There were inherent limits in the existing technology that required a new storage medium to address. (Note that LPs have not gone away entirely. There is still a collectors market, and current stuff produced on vinyl for that market, who believe there is better sound quality from old analog storage than modern digital media.)

And CDs are giving way to DVDs, which offer much higher capacity, and the option to include things like video along with the audio tracks.

I see no indication that book publishers want to see hardbacks replaced. In 1988-89, most CDs cost 50% more than LPs. But today people expect eBooks to retail for less than hardbacks. Until publishers are willing to accept much less for their eBooks than they get for their hardbacks, I do not see hardbacks going away either.

Two kinds of buyers buy hardcovers. Some want a durable long-term copy that they plan to keep. Others want the book now, and will pay a premium to get it. The latter group were the ones who provoked the "Agency model" imposed on Amazon by Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan et al. They were buying Kindle editions instead of current hardcover bestsellers, because they just wanted to read the book now, didn't care about format, and chose the cheaper alternative.

The publishers behind the Agency model were seeing lost revenue as people chose the cheaper alternative, and essentially forced Amazon to charge a higher price and remit more of the sale if it wanted to offer electronic editions at the same time as the hardcover, to compensate for the lost revenue in not selling the hardcover edition.

Mass market paperbacks are the most easily replaced by eBooks. But I see their buyers to want something cheap and disposable, with no worries if the books are lost or damaged. I don't see that market investing in eBook readers in order to read their mass market paperbacks.

If they can read on something like their smartphone, they have no reason to. They can use what they already have for other reasons

As a result, I don't see eBooks taking over until publishers are willing to accept less per title, and go for the volume.

This assumes that volume will increase if prices drop. It may, in the sense of "the buyer will get the cheaper MMPB edition over the more expensive ebook edition", but price is not the only factor. eBooks offer convenience - they can be purchased and read at any time, without requiring a visit to the retailer - and they don't have the storage issues of paper volumes. Many folks may find the electronic edition worth a premium over the paper volume.

Ultimately, though, books in either format compete for the reader's discretionary time, and must content against the other things the reader could be doing instead. This will tend to impose limits on how many books a reader buys, period. The scarce resource here is time to read the books, not money to buy them, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

PS - What I do see disappearing are those trade paperbacks which in the past would have been printed as mass market paper backs, i.e., fiction novels like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Some of that stuff is still issued in mass market format. There is still a large market for PB editions of stuff in the public domain you can get from Project Gutenberg if you don't mind electronic versions.

Trade paper editions address the market segment that want something better than a mass market PB, but aren't quite willing to spring for a hardcover edition.

Both will still be there as long as a large enough number of people prefer paper volumes.
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Dennis