alt Hacker NewsI’d love to read more books on paper but purely from a utilitarian standpoint, the UK’s race to enormous books (both hardback and paperback) makes it unworkable. Some of the latest books are more like pulpit bibles than something I can toss in a bag for the commute.
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TheOtherHobbes • today at 7:37 PM
There's been a trend for some genres to bloat. The usual industry guidance is that a novel shouldn't be more than 100k words, but 120k words is tolerable at a push. But some fantasy and adjacent writers have been producing 200k words, and plenty of readers love them.
200k on a screen is trivial, but in paper form it's a monster.
In my mind the problem is that those buyers have better places to go than mass market paperbacks.
Someone like you who cares about practicality of “tossing in a bag for a commute” is better served by an e-reader.
Someone who finds hardcovers and big paperbacks too expensive or ungainly, again, better served by e-readers.
Someone who wants the cheapest price possible: e-readers.
That leaves the physical book buyer in much be same niche as a vinyl or 4K UHD Blu-ray buyer. They aren’t buying for convenience and the way the physical object looks and performs matters a lot more than convenience.