A Bit of a Rip Off

What's the idea behind trade paperback books?

It used to be that trade paperbacks were published as alternatives to hardcover books. They were intended to be books of lasting value with content of lasting value. Usual trade paperback publications included books by Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Wolfe, among others serious authors. The cost of trades was about double that of mass market paperbacks, but they were books one was likely to read several times over the course of ten or more years. Most new popular novels and potboilers went straight from hardback to mass market. Most mysteries and detective novels were usually first published in mass paperback. Let's face it; most books published in any given year aren't worth reading more than once.

It's infuriating to go to the bookstore and find a book that is of mild interest and which one is perhaps willing to spend six or seven dollars to give a look at and find that the damn thing costs fifteen dollars in trade paperback. Today I went to the bookstore and found Maigret novels that were published fifteen years ago in mass paperback for three dollars apiece now being sold in trade paperback format for fourteen dollars. There was a series of detective novels written by a Russian that feature stories that have plots approaching those of Saturday morning movie serials being pawned off for fifteen bucks. I even saw one book of about 180 pages where the margins of the pages were one inch wide and the spacing between the lines was double -- a lot of white space.

Trade paperbacks are a scam perpetrated by the publishers, and you can be pretty sure that the author isn't pocketing the extra six bucks. Raymond Chandler isn't around to pick up the extra cash. Neither is Georges Simeon. But their books, which in mass market format fit nicely into one's jacket pocket, are now published as trades, cost more, and only fit in a briefcase.

Somebody is making some serious cash out of this deal, and it sure isn't me and it sure isn't you.

I'm not one for calling for boycotts, but I'm about to call for a boycott of trade paperbacks simply because the damn things cost too much for what one gets. Is anyone with me on this?