Hard backs are expensive. Not just to buy, but to create.I have never liked them. Heavy and cumbersome, printed in a type that is so large that it feels like it takes a day longer to read, if only for all the page turning. Their only advantage, it seems to me, is how lovely they look on the bookshelf (after the gaudy dust jacket is removed).
They are also a glass ceiling of sorts, in the book world. Not every publishing house can afford to print them. If the book is expected to sell copies by the hundreds, rather than the thousands, printing in hardback is unwise. Not only will it be pricey, it is risky too. If the book doesn’t succeed, the publisher has lost that much more money. Moreover, consumers are less likely to shell out the money for the hardback so initial sales would be lower than straight to paperback.
Why print in hardback at all, then? Because many of the big trade media won’t review a book if it is a paperback. Paperbacks are for second editions and they only want to see what’s brand-spanking-new. And without those reviews, it is much harder for those books to get publicity. Without publicity, books only sell if someone happens upon them or are looking for that books existence. Some nonfiction can make it this way, biographies and memoirs are seriously wounded and fiction is finished, without a first edition in hardback. This is clearly disadvantageous to the smaller publishers and the riskier books.
