Hardbacks

There is a growing fashion for fake books. Not fake as in written by a series of AI prompts, but fake as in things - cleverly painted empty boxes, or a façade of spines glued to a wall - designed to mislead the casual onlooker into thinking that they are books.

No matter which way you look at it, sales of mass market paperbacks have been in steady decline since 2017. NPD BookScan data shows that unit sales fell 31.5% in 2021 compared to 2017, while the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies put the decline in dollar sales at a more disturbing 42.7% in 2020. Both data sets show more declines occurring in 2022.

A recent study concluded that college students prefer paper to e-books at an alarming rate, almost nine to one. Does our preference for paper sound the death knell of e-books? Or have e-books simply failed to live up to their potential?  Read more

Commenting on the announcement of Lynda La Plante's new company, my colleague Philip Jones noted in his recent FutureBook blog that "format shift doesn't always work as you'd imagine." How true, as we seem to discover afresh each day.  Read more