I, and I’m sure many of you, will have noticed the tendency among publishers to go for larger font sizes in new books, thus making books much fatter than they need to be.
Earlier today I was browsing in a local book shop and noticed John Le Carre’s novel Absolute Friends, looking a bit bigger than I recalled.
This edition runs to 438 pages and costs £8:99. I’ve compared with my paperback edition from 2004 which was 383 pages and cost £6:99.
So that’s a 14% increase in size. Using the Bank of England inflation calculated the cost then is equivalent to £10:22 today, and adding in the 14% increase in size today’s price should be £11:65 (I realise this is a crude equivalence, but this is a blogpost, not a management report).
I’m mystified by firstly the increase in the size of books generally, when we’re in an age where we’re supposed to be conserving resources and secondly by the lower prices. No doubt printing technology has improved in the intervening years, but my feeling is that this is so unnecessary.
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bungliemutt says
Equally irritating is the decline in production quality whereby many paperbacks are not given proper print runs, but printed instead on paper of a floppy recycled bog roll nature – Penguin Random House are particularly guilty of this. If I pay 10 quid for a paperback I expect it to be produced to a reasonable standard. I know this is a means of keeping less popular titles in print, but it’s a disappointing trend nevertheless. First World problem I guess.
fentonsteve says
Says the man who designs printers… Font size is a combination of printer resolution and paper quality. A high-quality printer can print sharp text in small font size, but only if the paper stock is good. Much modern paper is cheap and/or recycled and small fonts look blurred on it.
dai says
Book readers are getting older with poorer eyesight so need larger print?
Junior Wells says
Bigger print works for me.
ip33 says
Hi, it’s your friendly resident Bookbinder here.
The books you are talking about are probably bound in China or similar. One of the things that has improved is that the machines I and others use can handle much lighter stock than before, which is how you get them printed on ‘bog paper’ now. They bash these out at much higher speeds than was possible before, perfect for mass produced paperbacks.
Most binders in this country tend not to do this sort of work, the costs are too high.
We tend to do shortish runs (50 to 250000) but very high quality because that’s where the money is.
Colin H says
There are two points from what you’re saying, Carl: font size increases and book size increases. In general, I’ve noticed an increase in average font size and width of leading between, say, Penguin paperbacks from the 50s and most paperbacks today. Has the population’s eyesight deteriorated generally in that time? (I mean a person of X years in 1950 and one of X years now – not the same person then and now!)
The book size issue is a bugbear with me. Far too many books are inflated in size unnecessarily, purely to make them seem bigger – a perception of value. Have a look at all those crappy celebrity memoirs and the like that appear before Christmas – 50,000 ghostwritten words puffed out to look like a proper book. Thicker paper stock, wider leading, big margins, ridiculously large font… Similarly, I especially loathe those hardback-sized paperbacks of some new titles that appear (before a ‘normal’ paperback appears a year or two later). They’re ugly and unwieldy. But I rarely buy the kind of mass-market books to which these crimes are done by their publishers, so I’m commenting more as an observer.
Carl says
I agree. Those books that used to be, possibly still are, called Airport Exclusives.
I don’t understand it. Surely people want small sized books when going on holiday, not a double sized doorstop.
It used to be that you could get books at airports a couple of months before publication that were normal size, but some bright spark had the idea of making them big. And for some bizarre reason it has caught on, in that they keep selling them, but I’ve seen few people actually reading them.
Gatz says
In my bookselling days those were large paperbacks of books which were only available in hardback on the high street. (C-format in the jargon; B-format is the slightly larger size used for literary books and A-format the small size sued for mass market thrillers and somon)
Mike_H says
I wonder if this is the publishing industry pandering to a demographic who display-carry their blockbuster holiday paperback in much the same way that we music nuts used to display-carry our latest album purchase. Make the book bigger so it can be seen more easily.
Vulpes Vulpes says
I think there’s some of that in it. The “Airport Exclusives” phenomena is fuelled by the fact that WHSmith – who monopolise that market – make the bulk of their annual profit from the “Travel” outlets in railway stations and airports. Particularly in airports, they can flog oversized (hence the giganto-fonts), over-priced paperbacks by Dan Brown and Alan Titchmarsh to people who are already goggle-eyed and purchase-happy with retail-therapy endorphins, and do so by the truckload, alongside the airside-priced bottles of water bottles (individually security checked for non-presence of explosive H2O) and military grade next-to-zero-cocoa-content “chocolate” bars.
SteveT says
Speaking from my own viewpoint I am not a fan of smaller font sizes and have actually put back a book that I have browsed and is of interest to me purely because the font size is too small.
Yes I wear glasses but its not just that. These days I rarely have two or three hours to spare just to read so I tend to read in 30-40 minute spells. If I am reading a book with a small font it very often feels like I am not getting anywhere with it. I realise of course that it is perception but it is off putting.
On a similar issue Uncut for many years had very flimsy paper but now seems to have gone to a seemingly higher quality production altogether.
Sitheref2409 says
Why is the font bigger?
It’s to make James Patterson’s. Incredibly short sentences. And paragraphs. And chapters.
Seem like they can expand to be a whole book instead of 95 pages.
Colin H says
And another thing… I’m repelled by any book that has the author’s name IN LUDICROUSLY LARGE FONT and CAPITAL LETTERS. Hence, I’ve never read Patterson or any of those guys whose book covers scream at you. I’ve always insisted my own name is small/normal size on my own books.
Mousey says
I saw the latest Peter Robinson in Abbeys (a fabulous shop for anyone looking for a bookshop in Sydney) for $40 and the GLW said “borrow it from the library”. Then I found a smaller, regular size paperback in our local bookshop for $20. Which I bought. And have now read. It’s excellent, as usual.
Carl says
That’s a steep price compared to the UK.
The current exchange rate puts that at £11:30. Here in the UK we can still expect to pay under £10 for a new paperback, with even better value if there is a deal like Buy One Get Another Half Price.
Mousey says
I just looked on Book Depository and the price is $AU14.79, which is closer to the UK price. And they ship free to Australia, from the UK!
BUT, I hardly ever buy books, and when I do it’s because the mood is right and it’s there in my hands in a bookshop.
And then I COULD have reserved it at the library for nuffink….
Carl says
In a reversal of that, a few years back I bought the De Luxe version of Music From the North Country by the Jayhawks (2CD + DVD) from Australia for, as I recall, the equivalent of £7:00 plus P&P. Elsewhere that version was costing around £20.
Twang says
Mmm, sympathetic to the general grumble but I’m reading”The Martian” recommended by Billy Bob which is quite superb, in nice clear small font on decent paper. So I’m happy!