I hate those trade sized things, they annoy me. Waste of shelf space and more annoying to read. I suppose if you read books with two hands normally you wouldn’t notice that bit as much, perhaps.

You also have to realise those are about $25 in greenbacks, here, too. If all books only come out in this format, I’d just stop buying them, or maybe only get a few electronic.

Only time I have ever bought those is remaindered or whatever they call it from bookcloseouts, or got one as a freebie, and been given a couple.

Given the list of books I would like to get to (thousands), not much chance of me reading anything a dozen times. That would matter more to collectors over readers, I would think, the durability thing. I think I would agree that more recent paperbacks are probably crappier quality in general, than the ones I have from the 70s/80s that are still fine.

I don’t know if hardcovers have gone up as much as paperbacks over the past 10-15 years. They probably have, but that’s simply my opinion because of what I remember spending on paperbacks.

HCs don’t tend to fall apart after a dozen readings, where a lot of newer paperbacks seem more fragile after frequent use. I’ve even gone so far as to buy tpb reprints of older mmpb’s I already owned. Hell, I wish all of the omnibus reprints that DAW and others are putting out were coming out in tpb, instead of just some of them… I’d be more inclined to buy them, instead of just thicker mmpb reprints of stuff I already have.

As in, I bought tpb reprints of Melanie Rawn’s “Dragon Prince” trilogy, and gave the mmpb’s to a friend. DAW hasn’t reprinted the followup “Dragon Star” trilogy in tpb yet, though. However, DAW reprinted CJ Cherryh’s “Faded Sun” trilogy only as a mmpb collection. Silly… I would have bought the tpb reprint without hesitation, but since I already have the individual novels of the trilogy as mmpb, I have no desire to rebuy the collection as an mmpb.

That’s a question I’d like to pose to someone in publishing… why do they choose a mmpb reprint over a tpb reprint? Orb does classic reprints in tpb, making them more attractive… why doesn’t DAW do the same with all their classic reprints?

I have seen in the past saying ‘prices go up because of the rising cost of paper’ – if that was really a big factor wouldn’t shorter books be better, economically?

Are the 100K words books the books that sell the most, in general for ‘original’ fiction? (not counting Conan, Star Wars, or whatever).

From a consumer’s point of view, buying Judas Unchained certainly gets you more words for the dollar – do lots of readers mention this to authors – that they like longer books from a ‘bang for your buck’ standpoint?

Here’s the link to the start of the brouhaha.

http://www.dragonpage.com/2007/01/09/romance-and-scifi-happily-ever-after/#comments

Summer would have to tell you a bit more about the faux-pas and where the romance SMACKDOWN came about.