The squat little paperbacks once crammed into drugstore racks are vanishing, and the industry now says the format's long run is effectively over. After nearly a century in wide circulation, mass market paperbacks have been squeezed by e-books, audiobooks, and more profitable print formats—most recently taking a major hit when ReaderLink, the biggest supplier to airport and big-box outlets, dropped them entirely. The collapse has been swift, the New York Times reports. In 2006, Americans bought around 103 million mass market paperbacks, according to Circana BookScan; last year, sales were below 18 million.
It's a steep fall for what historian Paula Rabinowitz calls one of the great technologies of the last century: cheap, pocket-size books that spread from Allen Lane's 1930s Penguin paperbacks to American train stations, supermarkets, and GI pockets in World War II. For decades, lurid "pulps," westerns, thrillers, and even classics with racy covers could sell millions, helping launch careers like Stephen King's; the writer said "paperback money" from Carrie let him quit teaching. Publishers kept issuing tens of thousands of titles, but readers drifted away—first to cheaper, ultra-portable e-books (especially heavy romance readers who once plowed through stacks of mass markets), then to pricier but more substantial-feeling trade paperbacks and tricked-out hardcovers.
"We follow the consumer," said ReaderLink CEO Dennis Abboud. With only about 30 cents difference in production cost between a mass market and a trade paperback, but as much as a $6 gap in price, retailers followed readers. Hudson, the airport staple, has now removed mass markets from its convenience stores, keeping only small selections in dedicated bookstores. "It's puzzling in some ways: with all the concerns around affordability, you might expect readers to gravitate toward a lower-cost option," Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius said, per Publishers Weekly. "But that hasn't been the case with books, at least not in print."
The format isn't entirely gone, per the Times. Cheap editions of staples like To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, and A Raisin in the Sun still move in significant numbers to schools, and used-book hunters at places like New York City's Strand bookstore pay serious money for vintage pulps. But even the Bridgerton novels that began as traditional mass markets are now only being reprinted in trade and hardcover. For readers like 18-year-old Landon DeLille, who said those pocket-size titles pulled him into reading, the future is clear: He left the Strand with a signed trade paperback.
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