Publishers go paperback-first as readers shun bulky bo

 We wear calm on the outside,

but inside-a silent war never ends.

~ Pratibha Shet

"I am not poor. Poor are those who desire many things." 

~ Leonardo da Vinci

Reality Instruction London Review of Books

You’ve lived this life before Aeon

Publishers go paperback-first as readers shun bulky books 📚

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Hardback titles remain profitable, yet fewer readers favour the format

The final chapter may be being written on hardback books as publishers experiment with a paperback-first strategy, because readers are turned off by bulky tomes, a survey showed.

A number of much-anticipated new titles are being released in paperback format, despite the financial advantages that the hardback-first strategy has for publishers.

The traditional publishing strategy is for the hardback to be released first, which garners more profit per book than with paperbacks and which can help to create a “buzz”, making it easier to persuade bookshops to later stock vast quantities of the cheaper format.

A survey by a London bookshop owner indicated readers’ antipathy towards hardbacks, with 46 per cent saying that they hardly ever or never bought hardbacks compared with 9 per cent who said that they always or mostly bought them.

Data from Nielsen IQ, which monitors the majority of book sales in Britain, shows that 72 per cent of books sold in 2025 were in paperback format despite these, in general, being released 12 months later.

Tom Rowley, who runs the Backstory bookshop in south London and conducted the survey, recorded a difference between fiction and non-fiction, with 81 per cent of novels sold at the shop last year being paperback compared with about 66 per cent of non-fiction titles.

Tom Rowley, who runs a bookshop in south London, said people buying novels were more likely to favour paperbacks

LUCY YOUNG FOR THE TIMES

In a piece written for the social media site Substack, Rowley quotes a publisher outlining the reasons that the book industry likes the hardback-first strategy despite the low sales volumes. Very few hardback titles sell in the thousands.

Mark Richards, the co-founder of Swift Press, said that it was hard persuading bookshops to take “an unknown book, ie, most literary fiction”, meaning that publishing in hardback provided a window to garner good reviews.

Richards said that this then gave publishers a “chance of persuading bookshops to take it in significant quantities when the paperback comes round”.

Jim Gill, a literary agent at Felicity Bryan Associates, told Rowley that only two or three hardback books a month “really sell”, adding that the strategy worked as a marketing tool with the “real volume [being in] paperback or audio”.

Hardbacks do also provide more profit per book for the publisher and author than the paperback despite their higher printing costs.

Diana Broccardo and Mark Richards of Swift Press

JOSHUA BRATT FOR THE TIMES

In a sign that publishers may be changing their strategy in the face of reader opposition, however, a number of new titles are being released simultaneously in both formats, or paperback first.

Indicating that profits may not be dented by a paperback-first strategy, Rowley’s survey indicated that readers were more concerned about weight and portability than cost, meaning that pricier paperbacks were an option.

The survey of more than 600 readers found that 61 per cent preferred paperbacks primarily due to weight, format or portability compared with 35 per cent who indicated price was the prime factor.

A handful of the smaller publishing houses have begun to deploy a paperback-first strategy, following the lead of Fitzcarraldo Editions, which since its founding in 2014 has published only one hardback.

Its founder, Jacques Testard, is quoted on Substack as saying: “No one’s ever said: ‘It’s such a shame you don’t do hardbacks’.”

Last year, Canongate published Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore in paperback. Rowley said this had paid off, given that the title was still in his shop’s list of top ten bestsellers.

Faber is set to publish Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy next month in paperback initially, albeit at the slightly higher price of £14.99.

The publishing house also simultaneously released paperback and hardback editions of Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry priced at £9.99 and £15, respectively.

And according to Rowley, his shop sold many more copies of the paperback but also sold out its pile of “gorgeous, signed and collectible hardback” editions.

“That seems a clever approach to pleasing the reader while making a book pay,” the bookseller said.

David Wenham - One man, 100 minutes, five stars: We’ll be talking about this play for years to come

 

★★★★★CultureTheatreReview

One man, 100 minutes, five stars: We’ll be talking about this play for years to come

John Shand

April 18, 2026  

THEATRE

AN ILIAD
Wharf 1 Theatre, April 17. Until June 21.
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★★

We go to theatre in the hope of a night like this, where the words flare like fireworks, and insights become revelations; where suddenly the stage seems as limitless as life, and you watch and listen in wonderment.

An Iliad is that good.

Twenty-seven years after he last performed in Sydney, David Wenham floors us with his breadth of range and command of the stage. It’s a colossal role. For 100 minutes he’s only silent sometimes, when the gifted Helen Svoboda is singing and/or playing the double bass.

David Wenham unleashes his full power as Achilles. DANIEL Boud

Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s adaptation of The Iliad premiered in New York in 2010, based on Robert Fagles’ sinewy, exhilarating translation of Homer. Damien Ryan, who was assistant director on William Zappa’s The Iliad Out Loud during the 2019 Sydney Festival, brilliantly directs this Sydney Theatre Company production.

This is a more formidable work of art. Peterson and O’Hare have hammered their text until they’ve compressed the birth song of the Western canon into its very essence: the insatiable rage of Achilles. He’s enraged into inaction in the Trojan War when his nominal king, Agamemnon, commandeers his “prize”, the beautiful Briseis, with whom he’s fallen in love, and then he’s enraged into action when Troy’s mighty Hector kills Patroclus, his other love.

Wenham’s character, the Poet, lives in our own times and therefore comments on rage and warfare from Troy to Iran. But the piece is not didactic, other than to say to us, “Such rage has never solved a problem before. Why should it solve one now?”

Wharf 1 Theatre is configured as half an amphitheatre, the stage and walls black. Wenham opens a roller shutter and wheels out a cart loaded with miscellany, including a double bass. From a suitcase he sprinkles sand to make the beach where the Greeks landed. From other cases emerges an arm that plays the bass, and then Svoboda materialises. Thereafter, her singing and playing are a constant reminder that An Iliad is indeed, as the Poet says, “a song”.

It’s a song that Wenham can make soar towards the heavens, or crunch like a boulder on a man’s chest. Among his array of voices he unleashes his full power as Achilles, and it’s as daunting as his shadow is monstrous on the wall behind. Just as suddenly he’s giving us a humorous travelogue tour of Troy, or Svoboda is relinquishing her bass to work a wooden puppet who is Hector’s baby son.

Together they recreate the cacophony of Bronze Age battle with bucket, chain and cymbals, and then Wenham is Hephaestus, making Achilles’ blazing new armour, or the messenger Hermes, represented by a pair of gold sandals.

Every scene, word and note carries meaning; carries the play forward to its end; to its death, if you like – except that this is among the rare deathless ones about which people will whisper for years to come.

A cold river does not force its way to the sea.

It does not worry about the rocks in its path. It does not stop flowing because the terrain gets difficult. It simply moves. It finds the path of least resistance, and follows it. Not because it is lazy. But because it trusts the landscape to guide it.

South Moravia In Bloom

“Within moments, are understated, authentic experiences that remain largely invisible to visitors passing through. Small cafés tucked into side streets, artisan workshops that preserve centuries-old crafts, quiet cloisters and hidden courtyards that offer moments of stillness just steps away from major landmarks.”

In Praise of Serendipity

Card Catalog: ” In 1754, Horace Walpole coined the word “serendipity” in a letter to a friend, borrowing it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes who made discoveries “by accidents and sagacity.” 

He meant the wandering that puts us somewhere unplanned, and the readiness to recognize what we’d stumbled into when we got there. Some things arrive sideways and turn out to matter more than what we came for, and he thought that deserved a word. We still have the word. 

What we’ve lost is the wandering. The systems we use to find things now are built almost entirely around intent. We arrive with a question, leave with an answer, and the whole apparatus is engineered to make that transaction as fast and frictionless as possible. 

Lost in that transaction is the detour that becomes the discovery, the neighboring idea that reframes the question we arrived with, and the thing that couldn’t have been searched for because we didn’t yet know it existed…” 

The One Arm an Octopus Will Never Risk in a Fight—Its Sex Arm ZME Science

Stalin’s task in building what Senior calls his ‘Red Empire’ was made so much easier, and so much more brutal, by the intelligence the Cambridge spies passed to Moscow.”

COURIER has launched The Cover-Up, a major campaign on the Jeffrey Epstein story

By Sabrina I. Pacifici, 08 Apr 2026

Below the Beltway: “COURIER has launched The Cover-Up, a major campaign on the Jeffrey Epstein story, renewing a national push to investigate one of the biggest federal cover-ups in history and hold powerful figures, including Donald Trump, accountable while supporting survivors. An Epstein-focused microsite and newsletter now deliver original investigations, sharp analysis, and curated news, featuring reporting from Camaron Stevenson, Nina Burleigh, and guest contributors on the systems and influence that enabled Epstein’s crimes. COURIER’S Publisher and CEO, Tara McGowan, spoke with National Correspondent on Tuesday to discuss his latest breaking news reporting on the Epstein beat, as well as our plans to continue investigating one of the biggest cover-ups in recent political memory…”

See also: Newly-uncovered documents suggest Epstein’s lawyer lied to Congress, by Camaron Stevenson. “Highly sensitive financial documents left mistakenly unredacted by the US Department of Justice appear to directly contradict what Jeffrey Epstein’s personal attorney told congressional investigators last month. Darren Indyke, Epstein’s attorney and one of his closest business associates, told the US House Oversight Committee in March that he did not withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars from Epstein’s Deutsche Bank business accounts in a way to avoid reporting regulations designed to alert authorities of potential money laundering or human trafficking. However, new information found in Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) submitted by Deutsche Bank to the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reveals that Indyke repeatedly inquired about avoiding Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs), and explicitly told bank employees he would stagger his withdrawals to bypass them…”