The Hardback Debate Misses the Point
A Publisher's View
There has been a properly entertaining row in the Guardian this week, kicked off by journalist Larry Ryan's piece arguing that hardbacks are too expensive, too cumbersome, and that the industry should ditch them entirely in favour of paperbacks. The letters in response were strong, with one reader defending hardbacks as a "statement of intent" and another, in his 80s, pointing out that hardbacks tend to come with the larger print that makes them more accessible to older readers in the first place.
As someone who has produced several hardbacks over the past few years, I have found the debate genuinely interesting, but also quite frustrating, because both sides are arguing about format as if it were a single question that applies equally to every book ever published. The reality from inside publishing is that the answer is far more nuanced than either Larry Ryan or his correspondents seem to acknowledge, and the right format depends entirely on what kind of book is being produced and who it is being produced for.
Memoirs and Why Hardback Still Matters
Memoirs and autobiographies, which are a significant part of what Chronos Publishing puts out, are still expected to come out in hardback, and that expectation is genuinely doing work even if the underlying logic has shifted over the years.
The hardback signals value at the point of purchase. It tells readers and reviewers that the book has been treated as a considered piece of work rather than a quick paperback churn, and that does still matter for memoirs in particular, where the author's name and story are the entire selling proposition. There is also an honest truth about how hardbacks function in the modern market, which is that they are increasingly bought to make a bookshelf look good rather than to be read. The paperback that follows nine months later is what most readers actually sit down with, and that is fine, because the two formats are doing two different jobs.
Larry Ryan's complaint about price is fair enough as far as contemporary fiction goes, but the people buying memoirs in hardback are not generally waiting for the paperback to drop. They are buying a thing as much as a story, and removing the hardback option entirely would lose something genuine about how that particular category functions.
Where Larry Ryan Has a Point
Where I do agree with him, although none of the letter writers seemed to pick up on this, is on dust jackets. The cost of producing them has risen significantly over the past few years, they tear or get lost almost immediately, and most readers I speak to either take them off and never put them back on or read with them already discarded. There is a strong case for the industry moving towards hardbacks without dust jackets as the default, with the design printed directly onto the case, which is something I’ve always done with our titles. The book still looks beautiful and the cost saving is real.
The Gap That Needs Filling
The most interesting point in the entire debate came from John Davies, the reader in Caerphilly who pointed out that he is in his 80s and increasingly values the larger print that tends to be a feature of hardback editions. That observation pointed at a genuine industry gap that very few publishers are filling, which is large print editions for readers who would otherwise struggle to read at all.
Large print is something I would genuinely love to publish, because the audience exists and the demand is real, but the economics are punishing for independent publishers. The print runs needed to make a large print edition viable simply do not work on the kind of scale that Chronos or FCM Publishing operate at, which is why this is a category dominated by a small number of specialist publishers and largely ignored by everyone else. It is a real disservice to a meaningful group of readers, and it is one of those situations where the economics of publishing and the needs of readers are pulling in opposite directions.
It’s something I’m looking at and trying to find a way around.
The Answer Is Not One Format
So the answer to the hardback debate is not to ditch them entirely, nor to defend them to the death as a statement of intent or a matter of cultural seriousness. The answer is to think more carefully about which formats serve which readers, to be honest about the production realities that shape what publishers can actually offer, and to recognise that different books have genuinely different needs.
All books want to feel permanent, and a physical book makes that happen. The longevity factor matters a little less, perhaps, in a contemporary novel, as someone is going to read it once on holiday, and pass it on to someone else; it’s not the pride of place on a bookshelf book. A reader in their 80s wants larger print, while a reader on the tube wants something light. These are all legitimate needs and the industry serves some of them well and others poorly, but lumping them all together under "do we still need hardbacks" misses the point.
I will say, I have paperbacks on my bookshelf that I’ve had for almost 50 years, I know where every mark and crease has come from and those tell of a book well-loved and well-read.