Why Are Books Getting Thicker?

It would not be an overstatement to say publishers mean to use pricier, thicker books to remake the industry itself, and reading habits along with it.

The year after she won the Nobel Prize, the novelist Alice Munro published a self-selected anthology, Family Furnishings. It gathers 24 of her best stories from the previous 20 years, weighs about a kilogram, runs 640 pages, and is 3.8 cm thick — roughly five and a half iPhone 6s stacked up. The Chinese edition, out in 2017, was a little lighter but half again as thick. Holding it felt like holding a gift box.

Books this thick are rare, in Chinese or in English. Publishers know how far a reader's patience stretches: past 300 pages, past 2.5 centimeters, someone will complain that the book is "too thick." "Especially now that attention spans keep getting shorter," one publishing editor said.

And yet, against all that, a trend has appeared. In 2015 The Guardian counted the pages of 2,500 books drawn from the New York Times bestseller and recommended lists and from Google's annual survey of the most-discussed books. The average had risen from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014. Popular books, in other words, are a quarter thicker than they were 15 years ago.

Books keep getting thicker, and people keep asking whether anyone still reads books at all. The two notes make an odd chord.

1

The simplified Chinese edition of Jerusalem: The Biography came out in 2015: 673 pages, 4.4 centimeters thick, 1.2 kilograms. It had been a bestseller in English, but how well the Chinese edition sold still took everyone by surprise. "Social science and history titles weren't lively back then; sales weren't good," said Yu Xi, editor-in-chief of Purui Culture, which published it. Around 2014, though, publishers began importing the rights to such books in bulk.

Cai Lei, another editor at the house, thinks that if Jerusalem: The Biography set off a wave of social-science reading, it was largely because the category found a new label and a new position from that point on: "popular social science" — "informative books that anyone with some education can read." They are written by scholars who can also write bestsellers. The subject matter makes a certain heft unavoidable, but unlike traditional academic writing, these authors can tell a story. "You can read it like a novel," Yu Xi said.

When the trend was just starting in 2012, the historian Keith Thomas, interviewed by The Independent, still scolded young historians for abandoning serious scholarship and spending their time reworking their doctoral theses, at their editors' urging, to please general readers. But social media has made it easy for a scholar to double as a public intellectual, and today few people see anything wrong with that.

In China, "popular social science" rose during the years when intellectuals still carried real weight online. Publishers leaned on them to recommend these not-so-easy books to whoever might want them. "They were the right people to do the recommending, and it worked very well," Cai Lei said. Liu Suli, founder of All Sages Bookstore, and the veteran culture reporter Qin Xuan both recommended Jerusalem: The Biography.

Then came Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a young Israeli historian who took his doctorate in history at Oxford and teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The book's achievement was to bring tightly synthesized expert knowledge to ordinary readers and give them just enough to think about. The English edition has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide and the simplified Chinese edition more than 2 million, clearing the path for Harari's next book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

On the popularity of such books (a pity it isn't actually thick, though 400-odd pages is plenty for anyone unused to academic writing), The Guardian noted that the appetite for serious reading has itself become a publishing phenomenon. These are usually difficult, heavy works of nonfiction, and they answer a hunger for intellectual substance.

Another reason may be that the times are getting harder — "a response to the zeitgeist." The world holds more uncertainty than it used to, and the arguments over politics, technology, immigration and the environment are full of noise. People want authority, and a book can still be one. "When you want a deeper, more nuanced understanding of an issue, books offer a depth and breadth no other medium can."

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Optimistic editors reason that if people will binge a whole season of a show on a streaming site, working through the next fat novel should feel much the same. Thick novels have never been scarce, and the past few years have changed little on that score. The simplified Chinese edition of Roberto Bolaño's much-admired 2666 appeared in 2012 at 869 pages. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, the biography behind the film Genius, came out in simplified Chinese this year, 4 centimeters thick. Paul Auster's forthcoming 4 3 2 1 also runs past 800 pages. Like the social-science and history titles, most of these are foreign novels brought in through licensed rights.

Lei Yun, who handles literary titles at the publishing brand Imaginist, is less optimistic. A long novel, she says, "can't be finished in one sitting over a single evening; it demands immersive reading, and going back into the story after a break takes a strong drive on the reader's part." Most people probably lack that drive.

Zhu Yue is a novelist with a style of his own. After publishing the story collection 《说部之乱》 (The Chaos of Fiction), he joined Houlang's newly formed literature division in early 2017. He is one of the editors of the new Chinese edition of My Past and Thoughts; the Russian writer Alexander Herzen's book runs 1,896 pages, with more than 1,000 footnotes alone. He admires it, but editing a tome that size was no pleasure. "It's like driving a long-haul route." When it was done, he had to get a new pair of glasses.

"I don't think a classic has to be thick," Zhu Yue said. He and his colleagues are planning a complete works of Lautréamont. Complete though it is, it is very thin: the French poet died in his twenties.

Then again, "for some books, the readers want the heft." Alex Bowler, an editor at the publisher Jonathan Cape, cited the Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Grey series in an interview with The Guardian. For an editor, he added, the middling book — neither long nor short — is the most awkward of all, and has no advantage whatever against an e-book.

Many publishing decisions now take e-books into account. Phones and e-readers have taken over the short and the light, so print has to find a market of its own, and the difficult, heavy book is a good candidate. So is design: as a physical object, a book is something an e-book can never replace. "Editors putting more work into binding and printing, improving how a physical book reads, making the print book into an 'object' by design — that is one way for print to survive," Lei Yun said.

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Book prices are reckoned to have risen more than 20% over the past two years (publishers usually supply retailers at 30% of the cover price), and still there is no room in the pricing. The industry blames the sharp rise in paper prices. That the trade is so exposed to paper only shows how little a book is marked up beyond its raw materials. A cost sheet from one publisher puts paper at about 45% of production costs, followed by rights fees at 28%.

A paper that weighs less but looks bulkier — "light paper" — has grown popular in simplified Chinese books over the past few years, and it is now a tool for adjusting both prices and expectations. "If a book is a bit thin, and higher-bulk paper makes it look thicker, then yes, you get a little more room on the price. That really is how it works, because people still feel books are expensive, even though the absolute price isn't high," one book editor said.

A printing plant in Hangzhou said it uses light paper more than it used to, especially for licensed titles, since it comes close to the paper in the original paperbacks. But an employee of five years there said the paper is still far from common. Its high bulk makes it harder to print: of the plant's six machines, only two can run light paper, and there is no plan to add more.

"You won't see it on a teen bestseller, because those readers are young and used to paper that's bright white and smooth — light paper feels like scratch paper to them," Cai Lei said. It goes instead to the categories that are already heavy — novels, social science and history — where it adds to a book's overall thickness while making it somewhat lighter to carry.

Weight matters more than thickness when publishers think about portability. Trim size comes next: "If making it thicker lets you shrink the trim size so it fits in a woman's handbag, then of course you make it thicker."

Rising paper prices do not explain the whole rise in book prices. In 2008, paper cost about what it costs now, and books were cheaper.

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On Chinese social media, arguments about book design run far apart. Sharp-eyed readers say designers have become publishers' "accomplices" in pushing prices up, laying in too much white space and using hardcover bindings indiscriminately. "That's how books get thicker. The design is entirely unnecessary. What matters is the democratization of knowledge, and that democracy has to be defended."

The other side holds that oversized type and loose leading may well exist, but taking design seriously is progress: "You can't go on making The Commercial Press's translated classics forever; it's time for a change." Some readers even back the price increases. Why shouldn't a book cost more than a bowl of noodles? "Compared with prices abroad, there's still room to go up."

A clever designer certainly knows how to run up a book's page count and its thickness through layout without leaving readers feeling that they have been sold paper. But the real change designers bring to the trade is finding the binding that makes someone want to buy the book.

Zhou Andi, a book designer of two or three years' standing, also concentrates on the interior pages, and he draws distinctions between what different amounts of white space do to reading: "More white space looks open and airy, and feels relaxed. But once the margins get big enough, it can start to feel like a classic. Very, very narrow margins feel modern. All of it has to be weighed against the typeface and everything else."

Wang Ling, an editor at Shiji Wenjing, thinks only a small share of readers care about these changes. "Readers who are really into reading are very selective, and they notice a book's details." Most readers notice none of it.

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Still, it would not be an overstatement to say publishers mean to use pricier, thicker books to remake the industry itself, and reading habits along with it.

When A Cheng's Venice Diary was reissued by Zhonghua Book Company in 2015, it came with wide margins, generous leading and loose typesetting — but the prose is loose too, and reads much like an actual diary. The red cover is flocked, with an engraved pattern beneath. The one thing likely to start an argument is the new price, close to four times what the 1997 edition cost.

This is definitely the hardcover Venice Diary.

The "Humanities and Social Sciences Translation Series," curated by the publisher Shanghe Zhuoyuan, took on a new look starting in 2016. One title in it, Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, ran just 142 pages in its 2013 edition. The new one is plainly more appealing: a clean cover layout, good colors, a narrower trim size, and hardcover gray boards. The leading is a little sparse, but the margins are narrow, under 1.5 centimeters, with extra white space left deliberately on the side near the binding. All of it helps you hold the book comfortably in one hand while wedged onto a bus.

After the changes, the book grew to 252 pages and the price to 45 yuan — more than double.

The gray boards in a hardcover usually add about two millimeters top and bottom, and about five yuan to the cost. An editor at one house said their newly appointed editor-in-chief called off the hardcover plans for several books, switched them all to paperback, and told the staff to keep new titles under 300 pages wherever possible. Thick books and hardcovers are expensive in every direction; printing costs aside, a heavy history book can take three years to reach publication.

In one sense the hardcover is a form of resistance, because e-books have eaten into the paperback market — the two are close in release timing and close in price. It is a bit like DVDs: fewer people buy them, having moved to streaming sites, and yet cinemas do not seem much hurt. "Some paperbacks now sell worse than their hardcover counterparts," an article in The Economist said.

Before paperbacks caught on in the 19th century, books belonged to a small minority. During the Second World War people took up reading in their spare time, and because paper was scarce, printing had to get more efficient, which made paperbacks more popular still. Penguin and New American Library seized the moment and reissued old classics in paperback. No book is reissued without a reason: these were aimed at a younger generation of readers — cheap, but carefully designed.

Reissuing is a marketing strategy. In the United States and Japan it takes a particular shape: if a publisher wants a book to sell, it puts out the hardcover first, and once the hardcover stops moving, releases the paperback (in Japan, the bunkobon). It works like the release window in film — a movie plays in cinemas first, and only later comes out on DVD. A film that goes straight to DVD stays niche forever.

That does not apply to the Chinese market. Right now publishers here seem to be doing the reverse. Books first published in paperback are coming back in hardcover. Amid rumors that publication numbers are running short, publishers spend a new number on them and treat them exactly as new books. Sometimes, like Penguin in its early years, they are after the attention of young readers; sometimes a novel has won a prize, and the hardcover serves as a coronation — with the prize duly printed on the belly band or the cover.

These reissues are thicker now, and pricier too.

Cover image by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash