george torrey wrote:
Couple points about speeding up the releases:

1.  Lower margin on tpbs or not, these things sell to people who will NEVER be regular buyers of hardcovers, for the obvious reason that they don't have the money.  I've seen the softcover Masterworks in Barnes and Noble and train station bookstores; I've never seen the hardcovers there.  There is a market penetration that doesn't exist with other formats.  The more of these out there, the more that will sell.

2.  I recall from misty memory someone saying that the hardcovers sell a lot right off the bat, then sales rapidly fall and limp along there after.  If it was a graph it would be a tall wave followed by a nearly flat line.  So the risk of cannabilizing hardcovers sales seems overblown to me.  Let's say they set a rule where the softcover would be published 3 years after the hardcover, and ran a schedule to catch up to that.  I think that would be enough time to recoup costs of doing the hardcover, without denting sales of HCs, and also providing a reasonably short wait for softcover fans.

3.  On a larger point, I think paperbacks needs their time in the sun.  People who can only afford cheaper options have only had Essentials in black and white, and those are into the 80s by now.  The DVDs are over.  Hardcover Masterworks have been chugging along for 8+ years now.  If other collections (and I don't mean the hardcover MMWs) have to be moved off the schedule to make room for 2 softcovers a month, I say that is totally fair.  Let people who want cheap color options get a little attention for now.  They have been waiting a loooong time for a truly comprehensive, accessible format.
You are overlooking 2 things: 
if the soft covers were to get closer to the HCs in term of release it would be an incentive for some readers to switch to soft covers, and sales on the HCs are already so low that Marvel seem to have slow down production and has increased price,
like it or not with out the HCs there are no soft covers Masterworks due to restoration costs, so the last thing we want is to accelerate the Masterworks death process.
And second there is also a market saturation problem right now, basically all classic reprints have experienced a steady decline over the past few years, and we have seen the once popular DC Showcase going from twice a month to once, 
and DC Chronicles took few months off and they are now back on a slower pace.

I think the guys at Marvel have a good idea based on experience of how much the market can generate in term of sales for any of their products, so the reason we have only one softy per month is because that is all the market can deal with.