It’s worth noting that it’s not “paperbacks” in general but the mass-market paperbacks in particular (despite the headline). The print book market (excluding technical books and textbooks which are a whole separate thing) had effectively three segments: hardcovers, trade paperback and mass-market paperback. The distinction between TP and MMP comes down to price, production quality and to a lesser degree target audience. A trade paperback will have somewhat larger pages, typically the same size as the corresponding hardcover and often printed from the same plates as the hardcover. Mass-market paperbacks were typically smaller, on cheaper paper¹ with smaller margins. Back when there were racks of books in supermarkets and drugstores, these were all MMPs and while bookstores would sell MMPs, they are geared more towards TP and HC sales since the lower price also came with lower margins (hardcovers make the most money for everyone involved and MMPs the least).
Since a large fraction of MMPs sold were genre fiction and a large fraction of that has shifted to ebooks (romance readers were the biggest early adopters of the kindle), along with the decline of book sales outside of bookstore channels, the loss of MMPs isn’t the cultural cataclysm the article claims. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the trade paperback space has expanded. It’s not uncommon for a new writer’s first book to be released as a trade paperback rather than hardcover (Emily St John Mandel is one notable example of a writer who debuted in TP but had later books released in HC).
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1. It was typically pure wood-pulp paper with high acid content, leading these books to be described as “pulp novels” and since a large fraction of these were genre novels, genre fiction would be referred to as pulp fiction and yes, that’s where the movie gets its name from.
It's said that TP quality is better than MMP quality that I disagree. I've frequently bought TPs that fell apart as soon as I opened them. MMPs are standardized and reliable, they have a lot of choices in how they make a TP and often they make the wrong ones.
Sure many MMPs are genre fiction but long long ago... you used to see really serious books like government reports on inner city riots, books by all the players in the Watergate scandal, books about science, shakespeare plays, serious fiction, etc. in that format.
Yeah I have a MMP of the Warren commission report that I bought for 50 cents on a lark…though I also have a different MMP promising details about UFOs :P
there was definitely a time when bookstores would sell predominantly mass market paperbacks with trade paperbacks being the exception. I got a kindle in 2011 and my paper book buying dropped sharply, so my bookshelves are full of books I bought before then and they're almost all mass market sized.
The retail side has alot to do with it. Newsstands and small bookstores are mostly done, and Walmart and other stores are mostly shitty evangelical Jesus books.
Even airport stores are at least half that crap in many cases.
I suspect this is why downthread I mentioned not remembering Costco selling books. Those kinds of displays so rarely have anything I’d care about that my brain just filtered them out heh.
I was at Costco three days ago and the books for sale table which, in years past, spanned much of an aisle, is now down to about a 5x3 ft table offering nothing to my interest.
I hypothesize that the kind of reader who wants a physical copy of a book is much happier to get a hardcover. I know I’ve personally lever liked the cheap flimsiness of mass market paperbacks and I don’t read frequently enough for the higher price of a hardcover to matter.
The kind of person who wants the cheapest possible book moved from mass market paperbacks to e-readers.
There was a recent article probably posted here about how UHD 4K Blu-ray sales are increasing over time, somewhat counter to what the average person might assume. I think this analogy works reasonably well. The 4K UHD buyer fits a niche of someone who isn’t satisfied by streaming. They want a keepsake physical piece of media with beautiful box art and the highest quality picture and sound available.
In contrast, the kind of person who would have bought DVDs from the Walmart bin has almost certainly moved to digital. They never cared about the quality of the media, they just wanted a low price with a lot of convenience.
> I know I’ve personally lever liked the cheap flimsiness of mass market paperbacks
I'm in the opposite boat. Growing up, I mostly had paperbacks, and when I encountered hardcover, I just couldn't fathom why someone would pay so much more for something so obviously inferior. They're a bigger pain to hold. Not convenient to put in a backpack. Take up way more space on the bookshelf. Etc.
Strong +1 from me. Hardcovers look nicer but are a PITA to read from, especially when traveling with them. I almost exclusively buy paperback when I opt for dead-tree books simply because the actual reading experience is nicer.
When I was little, like 10 years old, I was obsessed with reading when not in school. Also I had a lot of insomniac nighttime hours to deal with. And my parents got wise to leaving the light on in my bedroom, or the classic TV-ploy, "flashlight under the covers". So, in an attempt to fool them, I would bring my favorite tome into the bathroom, where they routinely left the light on all night, and I'd slip into the dry bathtub, and read to my heart's content. And I believe that this went on for some time until they figured out or called my bluff. They considered it weird and quirky that I'd chosen that route, but I really needed my books.
Later in my teenage years, I would be spending inordinate time in the bathroom every evening, with a tub of Vaseline. That's right, I was able to solve a lubricated, optimized Rubik's Cube in 63 seconds!
There are different grades or constructions of hardcovers. What you're describing is likely a cheap adhesive casebound. At the other end are the lay-flat hardcovers with sewn signatures and a specially constructed flexible spine. Those are a joy to read.
The high quality hardcovers address none of the complaints.
They are big, and bulky. They don't fit into a backpack. And you can't simply hold them in one hand and read, anywhere you sit. Like a bench in a garden. You need a space dedicated to reading them.
In terms of utility, hardcovers are strictly worse.
Lay flat hardcovers are much nicer for taking notes from. You can place on a flat surface and use your hands to do other things. A paperback will typically need a book weight to accomplish the same thing.
I own those, I would describe them as semi-hardcover, with fake leather wrapped around some stiff but still pretty flexible material. The text is also so small as to be difficult to read in all but ideal lighting.
Tbh I have a worn UK first edition of one volume (stored for now, I think it was TT). Beautiful fold out map, but the cover was cheap and flimsy. I think my latter US 2nd edition was better manufactured, not sure if that’s a postwar UK problem or not.
If you have a normal size backpack carrying a normal size load like you are going to work or school, it’s easier to slide in a smaller paperback than a bulkier hardcover. The extra volume makes a difference in this case.
When I was in school my backpack had to carry not only hardcover books for all my classes but also the associated notebooks and/or binders that the class all too often required us to keep as part of our grade. It often weighed enough that I needed to effectively do a squat to get in and out of my seat on the school bus.
I can think of one time in my adult life that my backpack has been anywhere close to that full, which was a weekend trip to New York City where I was testing whether I could get away with not needing to navigate the transit system with a large bag (it worked but didn't really feel worth the effort). A hardcover would be no issue to fit in any normal situation.
That said, when I travel I carry an e-reader and usually pick up a car magazine at the airport newsstand. My physical books stay at home.
I can't hold a paperback in one hand either. So there's no disadvantage to me on that front. And as others have said, hardcover books fit into a backpack just fine. They can also be read on a garden bench just fine.
I'm not saying you have to like hardcovers, but I don't find your reasons persuasive TBH.
If they're bigger than paperbacks (dimensions and weight), then they're inferior.
Sure - if I have a nice chair to sit on in the evening, with good lighting, and can rest it on something, they're quite nice. But the bulk of my reading is either outside of home (so they need to fit in my bag nicely) in an uncomfortable chair, or while lying down so I need to hold the book up. Weight/size really matters here.
When I was a kid I asked around, and in those days the reasons I was given were:
1. They're durable - less likely to fall apart - and may last generations.
In my country we have some retarded anti capitalist rules to protect the book industry.
When people realised they could import books from the UK and America for cheap bookstores started selling those $9.99 paperbacks.
As an added bonus lots of younger folks switched to reading in English.
Consuming media in Dutch is more expensive. Smart move government. Now they're whining about English taking over the public space...
I see audiobooks as crazy expensive and I don't like how they are locked down. If I paid $20-30 for a Martin Prechtel audio book and get an MP3 or something I could use any way I like it would be one thing but to be locked into Apple or Amazon it is just something I do when I am on the free trial... And Prechtel is one of very few authors I'd prefer it for because his work is so oral.
Agreed that they're overpriced. For some reason, I rarely want to own a DRM-ridden audiobook, especially at those prices. (The Lord of the Rings as read by Andy Serkis and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter are two recent exceptions that you should check out.)
Once I'm done borrowing an audiobook from the library through Libby or Hoopla, I might buy a physical book if I liked it enough. I usually don't foresee myself listening to the book again.
You mean per month, not per book? Most people I know that listen to audiobooks, do so through services that charge monthly subscription. Netflix for audiobooks, basically.
I really don't understand how audiobooks can sell. Maybe my brain is wired differently than normal but as soon as my attention is directed elsewhere I'm not processing the audio text anymore. It's ok with short youtube videos but I can't listen to books like that
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can't do anything else if I'm listening to a podcast or an audio book, I lose the thread. So I end up just sitting there listening. I'd much rather read the book in whatever form because I get way more out of it, presumably because of the effort I have to put into it.
that's more about a desire not to read, with the (IMO flawed) strategy of multitasking, vs. format. The % of people who have read a book in the past year is abysmal and continues to decline.
One of the most well-read person I know recently revealed to me that the hundreds of books he read over past few years were actually mostly audiobooks - because it turns out that most of his dayjob is physical, low-cognitive-demand kind, and pairs perfectly with audiobooks, basically keeping his brain engaged while his muscles do the repetitive work.
What you're saying is probably correct for some percent of readers, but I'm not sure how big the effect actually is. Personally, I listen to books that I never would have sat down to read in the first place, and the time it takes up isn't competing with reading (doing chores, driving, etc.).
Add me to the chorus of "I like to have physical books but prefer paperbacks for practical reasons". The relative flimsiness of paperbacks doesn't matter much: I'm not abusing them, I'm not reading any given book that many times, they'll be fine. But hardback books are bigger and heavier than paperbacks.
If you buy a lot of your books second-hand and live in an expensive part of the world (as I do) then you will likely find that the cost of the books is less than the cost of the larger house you need to fit them in. So you want physically smaller editions of the books if possible.
There are exceptions, of course. Anything you frequently want to have open and flat in front of you -- e.g., cookery books -- you will prefer to be a nice hardback that you can do that with. "Coffee table" books whose whole purpose is to look nice need to be hardbacks (though I personally buy very few of those). Some books never get published in paperback editions.
I don't agree with you premise at all. I want physical books that I can read and lend without restrictions (including power requirements) instead of having yet another corporate-controlled device to stare into but I don't want to have to treat those books well (the purpose of books is to be read, not to have me worry about damaging them) and want them to be as small and light as reasonably possible (even larger paperbacks are annoying to find space for in a stuffed backpack). The cheap mass market paperbacks fit those requirements perfectly and I was greatly annoyed that I could no longer find them for the series I'm currently reading.
> The kind of person who wants the cheapest possible book moved from mass market paperbacks to e-readers.
When I've looked at ebooks in the past they were usually more expensive than mass market paperback, most often on par with trade paperback. Has this changed?
I was thinking that too, but then the article mentioned at the very end that Canada isn’t experiencing the decline and its mass market paperbacks never ballooned in price. That one fact could prove the entire thesis of the article but wasn’t really explored.
I fit your hypothesis, with one proviso: even for books that I value enough to want a physical hardcover copy (for example, The Lord of the Rings), I also have an ebook version for convenience in reading. But for books that I would have just bought in mass market paperback years ago, yes, I just buy the ebook now.
Amazingly you can now stream 4K Blu-ray remuxes for a few bucks a month for a debrid service. But if there ever was a physical media I would buy it would be Blu rays.
> I hypothesize that the kind of reader who wants a physical copy of a book is much happier to get a hardcover.
Nope. I vastly prefer paperback. I don’t like ebooks much, and hardcover books are too large, too heavy, and take up too much space on a bookshelf. For books I know I’ll re-read, I might go for one, and I’ve certainly made some impulse HC buys that I regret, but I vastly prefer paperbacks.
One of the best things about mass market paperbacks was you could fit one in a jacket pocket, and easily carry 1-2 around with you.
Im my experience, people who read the most were the ones buying paperbacks for practical reasons. Hardcover was gift or for show, paperbavk for actual reading.
You yourself did not read that much by own words and was in harcover group for reasons that sound more aesthetic.
If you did a PCA on the reasons reading has gone down, this would get a very low score.
I can take most young people today, give them access to all the paperbacks in the world (and despite the point of the article, it is very easy to find paperbacks!) and their reading will barely change.
The culture has shifted. Screens are a likely problem. Books - particularly paperbacks - were handy because they could be used to in times of boredom. Waiting at the doctor's office. Commuting to work/school (if you're not driving). In the evening when nothing good was on TV and your computer is turned off. When you didn't want to tie up the phone line talking to friends.
Now there are many more alternatives to fill those spaces.
This article asks a bunch of questions without ever bothering to try and answer them. That makes it less than useless; it’s mostly insinuations.
There’s also a lack of historical knowledge. Sure, mass market paperbacks were a new format — but not completely new in 1939. Cheap paperbacks date back to the previous century. The author of this piece would have done well to spend some time with Wikipedia.
For that matter, showing some curiosity about reading habits in general would have helped. Reading wasn’t a new habit: dime novels and pulp magazines were deeply popular in the early 20th century. The jump to mass market paperbacks was not particularly long.
Yeah, this was my thought as well. 1939 would be a very late date for books to become affordable for the first time.
Virtually all the 19th century novels on the Polish school curriculum first appeared in chapters published in newspapers, appealing to mass reader and yet still managing to touch important social and political issues, often under disguise.
Here in Germany where I live now, the situation is different because of protectionist policies towards publishing (it's illegal to sell a book below the asking price of the publisher). There are publishers specializing in affordable editions of classics (Reclam, Nikol) and some publishers run their titles in multiple paperback editions with different prices, but obtaining any recent work is a costly endeavor.
A funny thing to vote down as it’s so well known. Dime novels, TV, video games, social media…anything new is a candidate to be attacked as corrupting “kids these days”. Even Socrates (recounted in Phaedrus) said that writing would be the downfall of students.
Nah, 25 cents in 1939 is 6 dollars today. There are 200 new books on Target.com right now for less than 6 dollars. Their own article has a grocery store spinner with $4.99 books and under.
Your library and project gutenburg have a bunch of books you can read for free on your phone or web browser. Or the kindle/Kobo ecosystem. And with the web, you can reserve physical copies of paperbacks or expensive new hardcover books at the library and have them waiting for you to pick up.
We live in an era of unprecedented super abundance of good reading.
This "i just found something unfair" style journalism is very frustrating because they only consider evidence that you are powerless.
You are not powerless. You can read great stuff and don't have to pay a lot. Go get it!
The article included the picture of the "grocery store spinner" to illustrate that in Canada, mass market paperbacks are still being sold and for half as much as they were sold for in the US.
I’d love to read more books on paper but purely from a utilitarian standpoint, the UK’s race to enormous books (both hardback and paperback) makes it unworkable. Some of the latest books are more like pulpit bibles than something I can toss in a bag for the commute.
In my mind the problem is that those buyers have better places to go than mass market paperbacks.
Someone like you who cares about practicality of “tossing in a bag for a commute” is better served by an e-reader.
Someone who finds hardcovers and big paperbacks too expensive or ungainly, again, better served by e-readers.
Someone who wants the cheapest price possible: e-readers.
That leaves the physical book buyer in much be same niche as a vinyl or 4K UHD Blu-ray buyer. They aren’t buying for convenience and the way the physical object looks and performs matters a lot more than convenience.
In my mind the change happened long before e-Readers came along.
Even in the 1980s there was a surge in expensive "trade paperbacks" that were frequently terribly built. Like you buy one from the store and open it and the binding cracks the very first time.
I have a lot of mass market paperbacks that I mostly bought used in the 1980 and I'd say in the 2000s they were in mostly excellent condition, but at this point in time they are pretty yellowed. My storage conditions are awful, an old farmhouse with a permeable basement, but when I look at books of all kind from the 1960s and 1970s, especially mass market paperbacks that have been rebound, the yellowing is severe.
But even despite them being "cheap", "low quality", etc. I think they were mass produced and more consistent in quality than many more expensive books.
I buy a lot of e-Books but I am putting together a kit for doing tarot readings for other people (most people find the cards are cooperative 30-50% of the time but I have a shtick that gets a response I like almost 100%) and I am starting to be able to work without a book but I still want books and for that I want real books, small books, not something to look at on a phone or tablet.
There's been a trend for some genres to bloat. The usual industry guidance is that a novel shouldn't be more than 100k words, but 120k words is tolerable at a push. But some fantasy and adjacent writers have been producing 200k words, and plenty of readers love them.
200k on a screen is trivial, but in paper form it's a monster.
We had some iconic mass market paperbacks with >400k words. The 1990+ version of The Stand, and Cryptonomicon come to mind, though Gone With the Wind and Shogun probably sold more.
Now let’s hold this mini-catalog up against the mass-market bestsellers list from the very month in 2025 that Dennis Abboud, CEO of ReaderLink — a former managing partner at a private equity firm — announced that the mass-market paperback was to be put out to pasture:
Is nothing sacred? This isn't hacking. More like cracking.
As far as I can tell, private equity firms are a virus exploiting bugs in our economic system to steal its lifeblood. The known bugs are trickle-down economics, the Citizens United decision, lax antitrust law enforcement.. the list goes on. I shudder to think what kinds of backroom deals happen every day to further separate us from our time, money and resources.
If the hackers of the world were to unite under one cause, surely it would be to patch our broken system and get the power back. Whatever happened to unmasking the bad guys and bringing them to justice? Has no one seen Sneakers, Johnny Mnemonic or even Hackers for crying out loud? Those aren't even classics, or books, but they run circles around today's ensh!ttified surrender culture.
Growing up in rural Illinois in the 1980s meant a large number of the books I read came from places other than bookstores.
We did have a Waldenbooks in the mall that was 45 minutes away that we went to 4x/year, but the local library was tiny and I read everything worth reading there probably before I was 10.
The local grocery store had a small section of mass-market paperbacks, and it was my primary place to get books. I know it had lots of Stephen King novels, and I think my first copy of Dune may even have come from there.
(Hardcovers were something that libraries had, not anything normal people would buy, as far as I knew.)
Interestingly, Waldenbooks in Mission Valley Center, San Diego, was one of my favorite vendors for software for my VIC-20 and Commodore 64. I still recall the “book smell” in that place as Grandma brought us there, and I would come home with Ghostbusters, or Zork III, and Compute!’s Gazette.
There were a lot of variety stores that could get away with a section for software or video games in those days.
> Beginning in January 2025, the company will stop stocking books regularly, and will instead sell them only during the holiday shopping period, from September through December. During the rest of the year, some books may be sold at Costco stores from time to time, but not in a consistent manner, according to the executives
There comes a time in life when there's "just too much stuff". Whenever that happens, things like e-books and other digital media become more important. And today, unfortunately, books might not be items that have any resale value.
For all the talk of how one doesn't "own" an ebook, I certainly "own" them more than all of the boxes of books I've taken to the Friends of the Library drop off.
This article doesn’t mention standard or trade paperbacks. With how much prices have risen on mass market paperbacks a slightly nicer trade paperback is a good value
I have long lamented the industries change from small format paperbacks to "Trade" sized and then hardcover.
I dont want those massive expensive lumps of dead tree's they cost more, take up more space on the shelf and backpack and are harder to hold and read.
Its gotten to the point i just dont buy books anymore.
I miss the days of reading in bed my small format paperback.
It’s worth noting that it’s not “paperbacks” in general but the mass-market paperbacks in particular (despite the headline). The print book market (excluding technical books and textbooks which are a whole separate thing) had effectively three segments: hardcovers, trade paperback and mass-market paperback. The distinction between TP and MMP comes down to price, production quality and to a lesser degree target audience. A trade paperback will have somewhat larger pages, typically the same size as the corresponding hardcover and often printed from the same plates as the hardcover. Mass-market paperbacks were typically smaller, on cheaper paper¹ with smaller margins. Back when there were racks of books in supermarkets and drugstores, these were all MMPs and while bookstores would sell MMPs, they are geared more towards TP and HC sales since the lower price also came with lower margins (hardcovers make the most money for everyone involved and MMPs the least).
Since a large fraction of MMPs sold were genre fiction and a large fraction of that has shifted to ebooks (romance readers were the biggest early adopters of the kindle), along with the decline of book sales outside of bookstore channels, the loss of MMPs isn’t the cultural cataclysm the article claims. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the trade paperback space has expanded. It’s not uncommon for a new writer’s first book to be released as a trade paperback rather than hardcover (Emily St John Mandel is one notable example of a writer who debuted in TP but had later books released in HC).
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1. It was typically pure wood-pulp paper with high acid content, leading these books to be described as “pulp novels” and since a large fraction of these were genre novels, genre fiction would be referred to as pulp fiction and yes, that’s where the movie gets its name from.
It's said that TP quality is better than MMP quality that I disagree. I've frequently bought TPs that fell apart as soon as I opened them. MMPs are standardized and reliable, they have a lot of choices in how they make a TP and often they make the wrong ones.
Sure many MMPs are genre fiction but long long ago... you used to see really serious books like government reports on inner city riots, books by all the players in the Watergate scandal, books about science, shakespeare plays, serious fiction, etc. in that format.
Yeah I have a MMP of the Warren commission report that I bought for 50 cents on a lark…though I also have a different MMP promising details about UFOs :P
there was definitely a time when bookstores would sell predominantly mass market paperbacks with trade paperbacks being the exception. I got a kindle in 2011 and my paper book buying dropped sharply, so my bookshelves are full of books I bought before then and they're almost all mass market sized.
The retail side has alot to do with it. Newsstands and small bookstores are mostly done, and Walmart and other stores are mostly shitty evangelical Jesus books.
Even airport stores are at least half that crap in many cases.
I suspect this is why downthread I mentioned not remembering Costco selling books. Those kinds of displays so rarely have anything I’d care about that my brain just filtered them out heh.
I was at Costco three days ago and the books for sale table which, in years past, spanned much of an aisle, is now down to about a 5x3 ft table offering nothing to my interest.
Costco made a decision a few years back that they were going to only sell books as part of their Christmas seasonal offerings.
Missing from the article is the role of ebooks.
I hypothesize that the kind of reader who wants a physical copy of a book is much happier to get a hardcover. I know I’ve personally lever liked the cheap flimsiness of mass market paperbacks and I don’t read frequently enough for the higher price of a hardcover to matter.
The kind of person who wants the cheapest possible book moved from mass market paperbacks to e-readers.
There was a recent article probably posted here about how UHD 4K Blu-ray sales are increasing over time, somewhat counter to what the average person might assume. I think this analogy works reasonably well. The 4K UHD buyer fits a niche of someone who isn’t satisfied by streaming. They want a keepsake physical piece of media with beautiful box art and the highest quality picture and sound available.
In contrast, the kind of person who would have bought DVDs from the Walmart bin has almost certainly moved to digital. They never cared about the quality of the media, they just wanted a low price with a lot of convenience.
> I know I’ve personally lever liked the cheap flimsiness of mass market paperbacks
I'm in the opposite boat. Growing up, I mostly had paperbacks, and when I encountered hardcover, I just couldn't fathom why someone would pay so much more for something so obviously inferior. They're a bigger pain to hold. Not convenient to put in a backpack. Take up way more space on the bookshelf. Etc.
Strong +1 from me. Hardcovers look nicer but are a PITA to read from, especially when traveling with them. I almost exclusively buy paperback when I opt for dead-tree books simply because the actual reading experience is nicer.
That said, I usually just stick to my kindle.
Hardbacks also hurt more when you fall asleep reading in bed and drop the book on your face.
When I was little, like 10 years old, I was obsessed with reading when not in school. Also I had a lot of insomniac nighttime hours to deal with. And my parents got wise to leaving the light on in my bedroom, or the classic TV-ploy, "flashlight under the covers". So, in an attempt to fool them, I would bring my favorite tome into the bathroom, where they routinely left the light on all night, and I'd slip into the dry bathtub, and read to my heart's content. And I believe that this went on for some time until they figured out or called my bluff. They considered it weird and quirky that I'd chosen that route, but I really needed my books.
Later in my teenage years, I would be spending inordinate time in the bathroom every evening, with a tub of Vaseline. That's right, I was able to solve a lubricated, optimized Rubik's Cube in 63 seconds!
Our daughter went the bathtub route when we unscrewed the lights in her room. Was proud of her but thankfully she started getting to sleep eventually.
NERD
There are different grades or constructions of hardcovers. What you're describing is likely a cheap adhesive casebound. At the other end are the lay-flat hardcovers with sewn signatures and a specially constructed flexible spine. Those are a joy to read.
The high quality hardcovers address none of the complaints.
They are big, and bulky. They don't fit into a backpack. And you can't simply hold them in one hand and read, anywhere you sit. Like a bench in a garden. You need a space dedicated to reading them.
In terms of utility, hardcovers are strictly worse.
Lay flat hardcovers are much nicer for taking notes from. You can place on a flat surface and use your hands to do other things. A paperback will typically need a book weight to accomplish the same thing.
Hardcovers may be made as small as paperbacks, but far more lasting:
https://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-Lord-Rings-Deluxe-Pocket/dp/05...
I own those, I would describe them as semi-hardcover, with fake leather wrapped around some stiff but still pretty flexible material. The text is also so small as to be difficult to read in all but ideal lighting.
Tbh I have a worn UK first edition of one volume (stored for now, I think it was TT). Beautiful fold out map, but the cover was cheap and flimsy. I think my latter US 2nd edition was better manufactured, not sure if that’s a postwar UK problem or not.
What kind of hardback books are you reading that don’t fit in a backpack?
The only hard bound books I’ve ever purchased that wouldn’t fit in a backpack were intentionally oversized “coffee table” books.
If you have a normal size backpack carrying a normal size load like you are going to work or school, it’s easier to slide in a smaller paperback than a bulkier hardcover. The extra volume makes a difference in this case.
When I was in school my backpack had to carry not only hardcover books for all my classes but also the associated notebooks and/or binders that the class all too often required us to keep as part of our grade. It often weighed enough that I needed to effectively do a squat to get in and out of my seat on the school bus.
I can think of one time in my adult life that my backpack has been anywhere close to that full, which was a weekend trip to New York City where I was testing whether I could get away with not needing to navigate the transit system with a large bag (it worked but didn't really feel worth the effort). A hardcover would be no issue to fit in any normal situation.
That said, when I travel I carry an e-reader and usually pick up a car magazine at the airport newsstand. My physical books stay at home.
I can't hold a paperback in one hand either. So there's no disadvantage to me on that front. And as others have said, hardcover books fit into a backpack just fine. They can also be read on a garden bench just fine.
I'm not saying you have to like hardcovers, but I don't find your reasons persuasive TBH.
If they're bigger than paperbacks (dimensions and weight), then they're inferior.
Sure - if I have a nice chair to sit on in the evening, with good lighting, and can rest it on something, they're quite nice. But the bulk of my reading is either outside of home (so they need to fit in my bag nicely) in an uncomfortable chair, or while lying down so I need to hold the book up. Weight/size really matters here.
When I was a kid I asked around, and in those days the reasons I was given were:
1. They're durable - less likely to fall apart - and may last generations.
2. The font is bigger.
> and may last generations
Having the survivors of the Great Depression around was amazing as far as mindsets go. I miss those folks.
I hate the bigger font too. I prefer fonts and spacing used by most MMPs. It's what I use on my eReader.
And you don't have to worry about any of that with mass market paperbacks.
No they are not, who wants to haul around a book when my kindle fits in my pocket? One I can’t read in the dark without an external light?
The French are on your side. They love their premium paperback: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collection_Blanche
Well, many people buy books for home library and read them only at home.
So when you are buying a good hardcover you get something that will last and you only read at behind the desk, "as it should be done".
Paperback is only good if you are going to use it to start a fire later on.
That being said I'm coming from a place where (in my youth) paperbacks where only for technical literature and pulp fiction.
In my country we have some retarded anti capitalist rules to protect the book industry.
When people realised they could import books from the UK and America for cheap bookstores started selling those $9.99 paperbacks. As an added bonus lots of younger folks switched to reading in English.
Consuming media in Dutch is more expensive. Smart move government. Now they're whining about English taking over the public space...
Not just eBooks: the growing popularity of audiobooks has presumably had an effect on traditional book sales too.
Audiobook sales continue to grow strongly every year, where as ebooks have been flat or declining in recent years.
I see audiobooks as crazy expensive and I don't like how they are locked down. If I paid $20-30 for a Martin Prechtel audio book and get an MP3 or something I could use any way I like it would be one thing but to be locked into Apple or Amazon it is just something I do when I am on the free trial... And Prechtel is one of very few authors I'd prefer it for because his work is so oral.
Agreed that they're overpriced. For some reason, I rarely want to own a DRM-ridden audiobook, especially at those prices. (The Lord of the Rings as read by Andy Serkis and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter are two recent exceptions that you should check out.)
Once I'm done borrowing an audiobook from the library through Libby or Hoopla, I might buy a physical book if I liked it enough. I usually don't foresee myself listening to the book again.
Why bother with libraries when you can subscribe to Audible?
It's free, and I'm boycotting Amazon.
In cases where I have trouble getting a book from the library, it's often on Spotify. An Audible subscription would be mostly redundant.
I'm quite happy with OpenAudible: https://openaudible.org/
Which is why most everyone does a subscription model. ~$15 per book, even if its 800 pages written.
You mean per month, not per book? Most people I know that listen to audiobooks, do so through services that charge monthly subscription. Netflix for audiobooks, basically.
Audible does X credits per month subs and a credit is 1 book. I guess there are Netflix style ones too now.
I really don't understand how audiobooks can sell. Maybe my brain is wired differently than normal but as soon as my attention is directed elsewhere I'm not processing the audio text anymore. It's ok with short youtube videos but I can't listen to books like that
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can't do anything else if I'm listening to a podcast or an audio book, I lose the thread. So I end up just sitting there listening. I'd much rather read the book in whatever form because I get way more out of it, presumably because of the effort I have to put into it.
that's more about a desire not to read, with the (IMO flawed) strategy of multitasking, vs. format. The % of people who have read a book in the past year is abysmal and continues to decline.
Multitasking isn't always flawed.
One of the most well-read person I know recently revealed to me that the hundreds of books he read over past few years were actually mostly audiobooks - because it turns out that most of his dayjob is physical, low-cognitive-demand kind, and pairs perfectly with audiobooks, basically keeping his brain engaged while his muscles do the repetitive work.
What you're saying is probably correct for some percent of readers, but I'm not sure how big the effect actually is. Personally, I listen to books that I never would have sat down to read in the first place, and the time it takes up isn't competing with reading (doing chores, driving, etc.).
Add me to the chorus of "I like to have physical books but prefer paperbacks for practical reasons". The relative flimsiness of paperbacks doesn't matter much: I'm not abusing them, I'm not reading any given book that many times, they'll be fine. But hardback books are bigger and heavier than paperbacks.
If you buy a lot of your books second-hand and live in an expensive part of the world (as I do) then you will likely find that the cost of the books is less than the cost of the larger house you need to fit them in. So you want physically smaller editions of the books if possible.
There are exceptions, of course. Anything you frequently want to have open and flat in front of you -- e.g., cookery books -- you will prefer to be a nice hardback that you can do that with. "Coffee table" books whose whole purpose is to look nice need to be hardbacks (though I personally buy very few of those). Some books never get published in paperback editions.
I don't agree with you premise at all. I want physical books that I can read and lend without restrictions (including power requirements) instead of having yet another corporate-controlled device to stare into but I don't want to have to treat those books well (the purpose of books is to be read, not to have me worry about damaging them) and want them to be as small and light as reasonably possible (even larger paperbacks are annoying to find space for in a stuffed backpack). The cheap mass market paperbacks fit those requirements perfectly and I was greatly annoyed that I could no longer find them for the series I'm currently reading.
> The kind of person who wants the cheapest possible book moved from mass market paperbacks to e-readers.
When I've looked at ebooks in the past they were usually more expensive than mass market paperback, most often on par with trade paperback. Has this changed?
Depends on how old the book is. You can grab plenty of them for cheap. One major advantage of ebooks is that they never go out of print.
I was thinking that too, but then the article mentioned at the very end that Canada isn’t experiencing the decline and its mass market paperbacks never ballooned in price. That one fact could prove the entire thesis of the article but wasn’t really explored.
There is a similar effect with DSLR cameras caused by the widespread availability of mobile phones with cameras included.
The “bottom end” of the camera market is basically gone now, but the high end full frame bodies are still selling.
I fit your hypothesis, with one proviso: even for books that I value enough to want a physical hardcover copy (for example, The Lord of the Rings), I also have an ebook version for convenience in reading. But for books that I would have just bought in mass market paperback years ago, yes, I just buy the ebook now.
Amazingly you can now stream 4K Blu-ray remuxes for a few bucks a month for a debrid service. But if there ever was a physical media I would buy it would be Blu rays.
On a similar note, but in the other direction: vinyl sales (re-)overtook CDs about five or ten years ago.
> I hypothesize that the kind of reader who wants a physical copy of a book is much happier to get a hardcover.
Nope. I vastly prefer paperback. I don’t like ebooks much, and hardcover books are too large, too heavy, and take up too much space on a bookshelf. For books I know I’ll re-read, I might go for one, and I’ve certainly made some impulse HC buys that I regret, but I vastly prefer paperbacks.
One of the best things about mass market paperbacks was you could fit one in a jacket pocket, and easily carry 1-2 around with you.
Im my experience, people who read the most were the ones buying paperbacks for practical reasons. Hardcover was gift or for show, paperbavk for actual reading.
You yourself did not read that much by own words and was in harcover group for reasons that sound more aesthetic.
If you did a PCA on the reasons reading has gone down, this would get a very low score.
I can take most young people today, give them access to all the paperbacks in the world (and despite the point of the article, it is very easy to find paperbacks!) and their reading will barely change.
The culture has shifted. Screens are a likely problem. Books - particularly paperbacks - were handy because they could be used to in times of boredom. Waiting at the doctor's office. Commuting to work/school (if you're not driving). In the evening when nothing good was on TV and your computer is turned off. When you didn't want to tie up the phone line talking to friends.
Now there are many more alternatives to fill those spaces.
This article asks a bunch of questions without ever bothering to try and answer them. That makes it less than useless; it’s mostly insinuations.
There’s also a lack of historical knowledge. Sure, mass market paperbacks were a new format — but not completely new in 1939. Cheap paperbacks date back to the previous century. The author of this piece would have done well to spend some time with Wikipedia.
For that matter, showing some curiosity about reading habits in general would have helped. Reading wasn’t a new habit: dime novels and pulp magazines were deeply popular in the early 20th century. The jump to mass market paperbacks was not particularly long.
Yeah, this was my thought as well. 1939 would be a very late date for books to become affordable for the first time.
Virtually all the 19th century novels on the Polish school curriculum first appeared in chapters published in newspapers, appealing to mass reader and yet still managing to touch important social and political issues, often under disguise.
Here in Germany where I live now, the situation is different because of protectionist policies towards publishing (it's illegal to sell a book below the asking price of the publisher). There are publishers specializing in affordable editions of classics (Reclam, Nikol) and some publishers run their titles in multiple paperback editions with different prices, but obtaining any recent work is a costly endeavor.
In fact dime novels weren’t just widely available but were decried as the source of truancy and corruption of youth! Sound familiar?
A funny thing to vote down as it’s so well known. Dime novels, TV, video games, social media…anything new is a candidate to be attacked as corrupting “kids these days”. Even Socrates (recounted in Phaedrus) said that writing would be the downfall of students.
Here’s a very brief example on the dime novel case: https://techlashed.org/panic/cheap-popular-fiction-penny-dre...
Nah, 25 cents in 1939 is 6 dollars today. There are 200 new books on Target.com right now for less than 6 dollars. Their own article has a grocery store spinner with $4.99 books and under.
Your library and project gutenburg have a bunch of books you can read for free on your phone or web browser. Or the kindle/Kobo ecosystem. And with the web, you can reserve physical copies of paperbacks or expensive new hardcover books at the library and have them waiting for you to pick up.
We live in an era of unprecedented super abundance of good reading.
This "i just found something unfair" style journalism is very frustrating because they only consider evidence that you are powerless.
You are not powerless. You can read great stuff and don't have to pay a lot. Go get it!
The article included the picture of the "grocery store spinner" to illustrate that in Canada, mass market paperbacks are still being sold and for half as much as they were sold for in the US.
I’d love to read more books on paper but purely from a utilitarian standpoint, the UK’s race to enormous books (both hardback and paperback) makes it unworkable. Some of the latest books are more like pulpit bibles than something I can toss in a bag for the commute.
In my mind the problem is that those buyers have better places to go than mass market paperbacks.
Someone like you who cares about practicality of “tossing in a bag for a commute” is better served by an e-reader.
Someone who finds hardcovers and big paperbacks too expensive or ungainly, again, better served by e-readers.
Someone who wants the cheapest price possible: e-readers.
That leaves the physical book buyer in much be same niche as a vinyl or 4K UHD Blu-ray buyer. They aren’t buying for convenience and the way the physical object looks and performs matters a lot more than convenience.
In my mind the change happened long before e-Readers came along.
Even in the 1980s there was a surge in expensive "trade paperbacks" that were frequently terribly built. Like you buy one from the store and open it and the binding cracks the very first time.
I have a lot of mass market paperbacks that I mostly bought used in the 1980 and I'd say in the 2000s they were in mostly excellent condition, but at this point in time they are pretty yellowed. My storage conditions are awful, an old farmhouse with a permeable basement, but when I look at books of all kind from the 1960s and 1970s, especially mass market paperbacks that have been rebound, the yellowing is severe.
But even despite them being "cheap", "low quality", etc. I think they were mass produced and more consistent in quality than many more expensive books.
I buy a lot of e-Books but I am putting together a kit for doing tarot readings for other people (most people find the cards are cooperative 30-50% of the time but I have a shtick that gets a response I like almost 100%) and I am starting to be able to work without a book but I still want books and for that I want real books, small books, not something to look at on a phone or tablet.
There's been a trend for some genres to bloat. The usual industry guidance is that a novel shouldn't be more than 100k words, but 120k words is tolerable at a push. But some fantasy and adjacent writers have been producing 200k words, and plenty of readers love them.
200k on a screen is trivial, but in paper form it's a monster.
We had some iconic mass market paperbacks with >400k words. The 1990+ version of The Stand, and Cryptonomicon come to mind, though Gone With the Wind and Shogun probably sold more.
Now let’s hold this mini-catalog up against the mass-market bestsellers list from the very month in 2025 that Dennis Abboud, CEO of ReaderLink — a former managing partner at a private equity firm — announced that the mass-market paperback was to be put out to pasture:
Is nothing sacred? This isn't hacking. More like cracking.
As far as I can tell, private equity firms are a virus exploiting bugs in our economic system to steal its lifeblood. The known bugs are trickle-down economics, the Citizens United decision, lax antitrust law enforcement.. the list goes on. I shudder to think what kinds of backroom deals happen every day to further separate us from our time, money and resources.
If the hackers of the world were to unite under one cause, surely it would be to patch our broken system and get the power back. Whatever happened to unmasking the bad guys and bringing them to justice? Has no one seen Sneakers, Johnny Mnemonic or even Hackers for crying out loud? Those aren't even classics, or books, but they run circles around today's ensh!ttified surrender culture.
Wild note here that Costco stopped selling books ?!?!
I remember going shopping with my Mom at Costco and the book section was like the highlight!
Growing up in rural Illinois in the 1980s meant a large number of the books I read came from places other than bookstores.
We did have a Waldenbooks in the mall that was 45 minutes away that we went to 4x/year, but the local library was tiny and I read everything worth reading there probably before I was 10.
The local grocery store had a small section of mass-market paperbacks, and it was my primary place to get books. I know it had lots of Stephen King novels, and I think my first copy of Dune may even have come from there.
(Hardcovers were something that libraries had, not anything normal people would buy, as far as I knew.)
Interestingly, Waldenbooks in Mission Valley Center, San Diego, was one of my favorite vendors for software for my VIC-20 and Commodore 64. I still recall the “book smell” in that place as Grandma brought us there, and I would come home with Ghostbusters, or Zork III, and Compute!’s Gazette.
There were a lot of variety stores that could get away with a section for software or video games in those days.
Mine usually has a bunch towards Christmas time.
When was this? I don’t recall Costco selling books outside of coloring books and seasonal stuff.
https://archive.is/MBOmm
> Beginning in January 2025, the company will stop stocking books regularly, and will instead sell them only during the holiday shopping period, from September through December. During the rest of the year, some books may be sold at Costco stores from time to time, but not in a consistent manner, according to the executives
I walked into a Barnes&Noble the other day, to check out the sci-fi section.
No mass market paperbacks. Just the trade ones.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
submitted, but no traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482146
There comes a time in life when there's "just too much stuff". Whenever that happens, things like e-books and other digital media become more important. And today, unfortunately, books might not be items that have any resale value.
For all the talk of how one doesn't "own" an ebook, I certainly "own" them more than all of the boxes of books I've taken to the Friends of the Library drop off.
Mass market paperbacks were my childhood. I couldn't get hardcovers due to price so I had to wait until all books made it to paperbacks.
I feel like reading a lot of books - good content or not - gave me advantages in school over my peers.
I may have missed it but I would not be surprised that the huge demographic shift in authors and editors would have affected readership too
This article doesn’t mention standard or trade paperbacks. With how much prices have risen on mass market paperbacks a slightly nicer trade paperback is a good value
It's like breakfast cereal all over again.
Insert stick in bicycle meme.
I have long lamented the industries change from small format paperbacks to "Trade" sized and then hardcover. I dont want those massive expensive lumps of dead tree's they cost more, take up more space on the shelf and backpack and are harder to hold and read.
Its gotten to the point i just dont buy books anymore.
I miss the days of reading in bed my small format paperback.
Charging insane shipping costs is another way to reduce access to books and blame readers and alien invasions.
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WSJ gets posted all the time.