volume control

["James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

A hidden reason for the appeal of the e-book fell into my hands 
last night from my own bookshelves:  volume bloat.  In 1966, I 
bought the standard Mentor paperback edition of Galbraith's 
Affluent Society and read away at it earnestly and mostly well. 
(Something of a period piece, it still has many merits, not least 
Galbraith's prose.)  That volume now sits on my shelf neighboring 
with many standard "trade" paperbacks of our time.  Without 
counting words, I got the best apples-to-apples comparison I 
could (same number of pages in hardcover edition, for the 
Galbraith had been reset for paper to get more words to the page) 
and found that the contemporary paperback takes up three times 
the cubic volume (Galbraith roughly 4x7x.5 vs. contempoary 8x5x1 
of the 1964 object :  volume ratio 2.85).  Bantam Aeneid in 
translation compared to today's Oxford World's Classics:  2/1 
ratio. This came to mind more precisely when I had the fleeting 
idea in a bookstore yesterday to buy a Nero Wolfe mystery for old 
time's sake, and found that they now come two to a volume in, 
yes, big clunky trades.  Next time you're packing your wheelie 
for a long trip and trying to squeeze in an extra paperback, 
remember that we've been deliberately making the p-volume less 
convenient and compact, to make it easier for competition to make 
us see how clunky it is.  Growth in the size of the physical 
object made it easier to give it a bulk and cover that would 
attract attention and readers in a bookstore -- no advantage at 
all when shopping at Amazon.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown