24 February 2014
Format shift doesn't always work as you'd imagine. It is an interesting quirk of publishing history that when paperbacks began to drive the market in the 1970s and 80s, they were often published by specialist publishers unrelated to the publisher of the hardback edition. These paperback publishers licensed the rights off the hardback publisher--and only over time did these publishers get consumed into the bigger houses, and authors accept the inevitable verticalization of their output, whereby their primary publisher became their only publisher across all formats.