Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
A point about paper books surviving because of demand: Consumers do not always rule. Remember when they replaced sewn books with perfect binding AKA glued? This really, I think the technical term is, sucked. Books started cracking when fully opened, and promptly fell apart. Glued bindings have gotten better, but are still not as good as sewn. And we didn't want glue. And sewn didn't cost much. But glue was forced on us anyway.
Cost rules. Because of cost, I think that we are going to see the public pushed to eBooks whether they like it or not. Five or ten years from now, when paper is the smallest part of the market, that will cause paper book prices to skyrocket. Then most of the paper holdouts will feel they have to come over the our side.
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I don't remember when they changed from sewn to glued books in general but I do remember when TV guide was stapled together and how they switched to a glued binding for that. Back then the TV guide was about the same size as a Reader's Digest book. It seemed they had a lot more in it back then too than in any book of any size about what is on TV now. Of course they had better programming back then too so I guess it balances out.
