mwiggins wrote:
Though now that I look at it, we may be talking about different measurements of the gap between the HC's and SC's.  Currently the softcovers are 7.5 years, not 11 years, behind the hardcovers (i.e. the soon to be released in softcover Avengers Vol 5 came out 12/2005 as a hardcover)  That gap will continue to increase as we move through the period where the HC's came out more than once a month. 


I think wildlele  had it right in that the publication gap is shorter now but will eventually grow to 11+ years.  They are currently only publishing one new SC per month but were publishing 2 HCs for quite a while.  In either event I'm not waiting 7 or 11 years for a current HC to be reprinted in SC!