Structures of Popularity in the Early Modern Book Trade

Why do reprint rates matter? For reasons both cultural and economic, different kinds of books may have sold in different ways, may have had different structures of popularity.19 What the comparison of playbooks and sermon-books reveals is that neither market share nor reprint rates tells the entire story of "popularity." [...]while we agree with Blayney about the facts concerning the market shares of sermon-books and playbooks, we differ over the interpretation of how those facts relate to reprint rates and to "popularity" in the book trade. To ignore such fundamental issues of supply would be naïve. [...]if we want to investigate the popularity of any class of books in a way that recognizes the complex relationship between supply and demand, we need to examine not only their relative abundance in the market (total editions and market share) but also their market performance once they were available for retail sale in whatever numbers (reprint rates and profitability). Among all books published from 1609 to 1611, playbooks were of median length; in other words, about half of all books published in those years were shorter than playbooks, and about half longer. Since profitability was tied to sheet length, it cannot be true that publishers shied away from playbooks because they did not have the potential to generate high enough profits, as Blayney implied in 1997 and as many have subsequently asserted.