More media death

From frequent commenter Christian Lindke, we find an article in Crain's New York Business, from which we learn the following. ("A good thing", mutters David, who hates trade paperbacks...)

Net sales of those artfully designed, easy-to-hold, pleasant-smelling trade paperbacks slid 18%, to $773 million, in the year through August, compared with the year-earlier period, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Meanwhile, sales of e-books, the second-place format, soared 144%, to $649 million.

Just as telling are reports from inside publishing houses, where more and more often, executives are thinking twice about which hardcover books to reprint in a trade paperback edition.

....

Some recent paperback sales figures show how fast the world is changing. Jonathan Franzen's blockbuster 2010 novel Freedom, for example, sold around 1 million copies, according to publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, with about a third of those in e-book and the rest in hardcover.

Since its Sept. 27 publication, the trade paperback edition has sold just 28,000 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks about 75% of the market.