{"id":564,"date":"2006-05-24T23:41:53","date_gmt":"2006-05-24T23:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=564"},"modified":"2006-05-24T23:41:53","modified_gmt":"2006-05-24T23:41:53","slug":"the_evil_of_the_trade_paperbac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/05\/24\/the_evil_of_the_trade_paperbac\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evil of the Trade Paperback"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I may not have done much of my promised blogging about books last week, but I was at least thinking<\/i> about the subject. Cranky Robert and I exchanged a flurry of e-mails which resulted in mutually recommended reading for both of us, as well as my discovery of the Titanic Book Site<\/a>, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the world’s most famous sunken ocean liner. And I also walked up the street from my office one day to Sam Weller’s<\/a> and bought a couple of books. That may not sound terribly noteworthy, but it sort of is, at least to me. You see, I don’t buy many books these days. And that’s quite a change from The Way Things Used to Be.<\/p>\n


\nIf you were to graph my lifetime book-buying habit, you’d end up with a sort of lopsided bell curve that starts off gradually in elementary and middle school — obviously, I had no real income as a child, and my only sources of bookage at that time were the wire racks at Riverton Drug and the occasional Scholastic Book Fair<\/a> — then begins a gradual rise around my high school years, corresponding, as you can imagine, to my new-found mobility upon getting a driver’s license, the construction of a nearby shopping mall, and the inclusion in said mall of a Waldenbooks location, the first bona-fide bookstore I can remember visiting. The curve arches sharply upward in the college years, when I discovered that I could buy old paperbacks for five or ten cents each at thrift stores and the campus library<\/a>‘s open-twice-a-week sale room. Sure, everything I got from those places smelled a little musty and was printed two decades earlier, but how could a lit major resist the temptation of picking up an entire stack of reading material for only a couple of bucks? I carried home many such stacks in the late ’80s and early ’90s.<\/p>\n

And then came the mid ’90s, the arrival of the Barnes and Noble chain in the Salt Lake area, and the revelation of the remainder table, where you could buy last year’s hardcovers for less money than this year’s paperbacks. That was followed by the appearance of catalogs and then online stores<\/a> where you could find many, many more remaindered books, and then finally there was Amazon<\/a>. Needless to say, my book-buying bell curve suddenly starts to resemble Mt. Everest at this point. I was in bibliophile’s heaven. There was only one problem: I was buying books at a faster rate than I could read them, and had been for years. I realized one day that I had dozens, if not hundreds, of volumes that I’d never read, had never even cracked open. Suddenly, all the pleasure drained out of my book shopping. I felt guilty and more than a little ridiculous. I wondered if I had some kind of addiction. I certainly felt out of control, and I didn’t like it one bit. The curve falls as rapidly as it ascended sometime around 2001.<\/p>\n

For a long time, I didn’t buy any books at all. I just worked on reading down the stacks a bit. Recently, however, I’ve begun to purchase again, but slowly<\/i>, just one or two on occasion. It’s all I will allow myself. And I find that such enforced moderation, which forces me to be selective about what I get, has actually made book-buying fun again.<\/p>\n

Well, somewhat fun. There’s still a problem. You see, the publishing industry has changed in the last few years. It used to be that you had basically two choices when it came to how you spent your biblio-dollar: there was the relatively expensive hardcover, and the relatively cheap paperback. When I was younger and didn’t have any money, I naturally opted for the cheap option. When the remainder table came along — coincidentally around the same time I started making some real wages instead of the pittance paid to movie-theater ushers and projectionists — I happily switched to hardbacks, believing them to be more prestigious and durable. But they were also more bulky, an issue which has become very important as space in the Bennion Archives is now at a premium and steadily shrinks with each new acquisition. So I’m back to favoring paperbacks, on the grounds that they’re more compact and easier to store in quantity.<\/p>\n

Except that the good old-fashioned paperback seems to have become an endangered species. These days, many, if not most, new titles — at least the ones I’m interested in — are published as trade paperbacks<\/i>, a larger format that looks like some kind of intermediate step between traditional hard and soft covers. Naturally, this new flavor costs more than standard paperbacks, too. They’re not as pricey as hardcovers, but they still put more of a bite on the old debit card than I’d like. I bought just two books last week — John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley<\/i><\/a> and a new “science fantasy” novel that caught my fancy, Chris Roberson’s Paragaea<\/i><\/a> — both in trade paperback format, and they cost me over 30 dollars. I used to buy a whole box of books for that much, two boxes if I bought used. (Most of the used bookstores I used to frequent have vanished, a topic I hope to cover in another post.)<\/p>\n

Not only is the initial outlay more, but the high price of trade papers is affecting how I handle my books. I’ve never been one to abuse them, but I find I’m much more concerned about condition now. I have to consider resale value in case I don’t like the book, and even if I do, I have an investment to maintain. I feel like I’m only a couple of bucks away from wearing white cotton archivist’s gloves as I read, and I don’t like being so self-conscious about it.<\/p>\n

As far as I’m concerned, trade papers have all of the cons of the two traditional formats — the bulk of a hardcover, the relative fragility of a paperback — and none of the pros. Frankly, I miss the days when you’d spend two or three bucks on a pocket-sized paperback that you really could shove in your pocket without worrying about it. Life was simpler then…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, I may not have done much of my promised blogging about books last week, but I was at least thinking about the subject. Cranky Robert and I exchanged a flurry of e-mails which resulted in mutually recommended reading for both of us, as well as my discovery of the Titanic Book Site, a wonderful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}