Inside Books: In praise of paperbacks

Lately, I have been giving rather a lot of thought to the humble paperback. I say humble, for this is a format with no pretensions of grandeur, no fancy binding, no place-keeping ribbon, no dust-protecting jacket that can be slipped on and off as you will. I have always been told that modesty is a good thing, yet I worry that it is the paperback’s quiet humility that has so endangered it.

Everyone in the book world seems to agree that the rise of eBooks is at the cost of paperbacks. Towards the end of last year, Victoria Barnsley, C.E.O of HarperCollins, said that for paperback fiction, ‘the market this year is down 7 per cent in retail value. I put this almost entirely down to the sale of eBooks’. The argument goes as follows: for a book to survive in printed form, it needs to be a piece of high quality production, otherwise people have no incentive to buy the paper version over the digital.