Shakespeare’s folios were mass produced and cheap. Some of his more famous contemporaries and rivals (well, famous at the time, anyway) produced handsome, expensive editions of their works. Only a few people could afford those books, so they didn’t spread into the culture, they survived in libraries and private collections. As a result, those authors and playwrights are studied only by scholars, if at all.
You can’t really separate text from container – if I write my magnum opus in the sand on a stormy beach, both text and container are disposable. I may as well have never written it. A paperback book may be cheap, but they tend to make a lot of them, and they can be found all over the place. As a result, they tend to be the things that outlast a culture.
Nah, I’m a librarian, so I have a different view of information, containers, texts, what survives and what doesn’t. In my experience, hardbound books are more likely to be discarded and not replaced; they’re expensive, heavy, hard to carry around, and best suited for libraries and private collections, which are subject to fires, disuse, mold, and (in the case of private libraries) heirs who could give a shit and just trash the whole collection.
Paperbacks seem disposable because they’re cheap, but that’s part of their lasting power. They’re cheap, lightweight, easy to replace, and will stay usable when the lights go out or the Internet gets turned off. In four or five hundred years, when future archaeologists / anthropologists explore our ruins, they’ll find more paperbacks than anything else, and that will be what informs them of what we valued and how we lived.
