Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks
"The format credited with making books more accessible via low prices and widespread availability will all but vanish from the publishing scene in a few weeks." With it comes a generational loss.
[Jim Milliot with Sophie Stewart in Publishers Weekly]
This is not the death of mass-market books, but it’s still pretty striking that mass-market paperbacks are about to disappear in a real way. ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in America, is going to stop carrying them — and we’ll notice the effect immediately. (Or, at least, we’ll notice the effect if we frequent places where books are sold, which we all still do, right?)
“According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications.”
I was a paper-only reader holdout for years. I love the feeling of paper in my hands, and the cognitive switch of not looking at a screen when I spend all day in front of one. Then I had a kid. The best time I had to read was in bed while he slept beside me, but he kept stealing my reading light as a toy and removing my bookmarks so I lost my place. I finally caved and bought a Kobo Libra Colour, which has a built-in backlight and a PIN that means no-one can mess with my books. I didn’t expect to love it, but I immediately did, and virtually every book I’ve read since then has been on it.
So, I guess what I’m saying is: I guess I get it.
I do think it’s a loss though. Both my grandparents and my great grandparents kept houses filled with old books, many of which were paperbacks. Those stories have lasted for generations in those bookshelves, throughout many cycles of technical obsolescence. My Kobo won’t, and when he’s old enough, I won’t be able to pass many of the books I’m reading down to my son. That’s a real generational / cultural loss.
When he’s old enough that I can read paper books again without fear of losing my light or place, I can switch to hardback editions, but at over twice the price, there’s a higher bar to buying one. And not every book ever makes it to hardback. They’re the vinyl records of books: beautiful to look at and owned by enthusiasts, but not a mandatory stop for each new release. And while I can buy these books to intentionally hand them down, it’s the unintentional accumulation that’s more interesting: the ability for him to pick out what he thinks is worth reading from my bookshelves.
Of course, libraries exist, and that’s maybe the solution here. Libraries are obviously wonderful, but they’re also under threat. We’ve needed to protect them with our lives for some time, but that’s even more true in a world where our home bookshelves are dwindling and the books we read are succumbing to technology capture.
Of course, that’s the story of the web, too. The Internet Archive — itself a library — is one answer to that on a cultural preservation level. But it’s the loss of that intergenerational and intra-community hand-me-down facet of writing-as-objects that really bothers me. I don’t know what the answer is.
[Link]
