THIS year's Man Booker Prize was awarded on October 14th to "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", Richard Flanagan's harrowing tale of Australian prisoners of war in Burma. Like most of the titles nominated for the prize, Mr Flanagan's work is so far available only in hardback format in most markets. At 22cm (9 inches) long, 464 pages deep and weighing in at more than half a kilogram, it isn't a convenient thing to lug around. Nor is it cheap, at £16.99 in Britain (or $26.95 in America). A lighter, cheaper paperback edition will be published next year in both countries. But why do books come out in heavy, expensive hardback format first? The first books were bound with strong, rigid covers. Small print runs made them expensive luxuries. The paperback was pioneered in the 19th century and became popular in continental Europe. It took off in Britain and America in the 1930s, when publishers such as Penguin and New American Library began mass-producing cheap but well-designed reproductions of older texts, aimed at a new generation of readers who could not afford hardbacks. During the second world war, interest in reading as a pastime increased just as paper shortages demanded more efficient methods of printing. The paperback was the solution.

But titles which are expected to sell well are often still printed first in hardback. Known as “windowing”, this sales strategy is also used in the film industry, where titles are released in the cinema several months before being sold on DVD. Like cinema tickets, hardcover books generate more profit per unit than paperbacks. And just as cinephiles like to see films on the big screen, collectors enjoy the hardback's premium quality. “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” has bright red endpapers; others sport embossed covers or come with bookmarks. Hardbacks' durability means they are also popular with libraries. And they hold a certain snob value, too: literary editors traditionally don’t review paperbacks. Once hardback sales have slowed, a paperback edition is released. Printed at a higher volume than the hardback, it usually sells in greater numbers, but at lower margins. Some publishers time their hardback editions to come out just before Christmas, eyeing the gift market, before publishing the paperback edition in time for the summer holidays.

For all the doomsaying about the death of the paper book, it is proving resilient. If anything, the main threat from digital books is to paperbacks. Readers who resist the cost of hardbacks by waiting for paperback editions now have an even cheaper, lighter and more environmentally friendly version, which they don't have to wait for. "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", for instance, is out now as an e-book, costing less than £6 (or $10). In the past, a successful book might have been expected to sell four times as many copies in paperback as hardback, but some recent releases have sold more copies in hardback than paperback, as paperback readers turn to e-books. Some in the industry think that e-books may eventually replace paperbacks. But many are confident that the sturdy hardback will endure.

Dig deeper:

An interactive essay on the future of the book (October 2014)

Amazon plays tough with publishers over e-book prices (May 2014)

Our review of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" (July 2014)