17 March 2014
Commenting on the announcement of Lynda La Plante's new company, my colleague Philip Jones noted in his recent FutureBook blog that "format shift doesn't always work as you'd imagine." How true, as we seem to discover afresh each day.
However, the "interesting quirk" of history he spoke of - that when paperbacks began driving the market in the ‘70s and ‘80s they were often brought out by "specialist" houses unrelated to the hardback publisher - was not how things developed in the US. A different pattern evolved in New York, worth remembering in light of today's challenges.
