Prestige format books are an ideal successor to pamphlets

Bleeding Cool has some news that, if there's something positive DC may be doing, it's publishing an upcoming storyline in the prestige format books that were starting to turn up in the late 1980s:

DC approached me and said, how would you like to take some of the stuff that you are working on with Sean and do it a new, prestige format? Instead of doing it monthly, why not do it in this format that would allow for it to be a bigger stage, both for Sean artistically, and to package the story in a new way and then allow every subsequent story that I was going to do with Paul Pope, with Afua Richardson, with Lee Bermejo, be done in this format that really foregrounds the art – different paper size, different cut, the whole thing?

Now I don't have a high opinion of Snyder. But if paperback format is the way they've decided to release projects like these and abandon the monthly approach - certainly for miniseries - that's the ideal way for comics to go in the future. Just the kind of approach I was thinking of myself, which is easier to sell in bookstores.

I won't be surprised if this All-Star Batman book he's working on turns out to be as pretentious as anything else they've published over the past decade. But if they're starting to change their approach to marketing and formatting, that's a significant step for this day and age, since it can ensure they'll be more accountable for story quality too.