\n<\/p>\n
Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. \u201cWe were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.<\/p>\n But the era of the \u201cpocket book\u201d is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.<\/p>\n Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: \u201cI don\u2019t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn\u2019t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.<\/p>\n \u201cThey had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick \u2019n\u2019 mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it\u2019s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>The Harlequin romance novel section of a bookstore in New York.<\/span> Photograph: Richard Levine\/Alamy<\/p>\n Now a New York-based literary agent, Romero owns an Amazon Kindle, which is roughly the same size as a mass-market paperback but can store thousands of books rather than one. Still, she feels that something is being lost. \u201cWhether it was the ink or the paper, they had a certain smell and it\u2019s very nostalgic to me and many others.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re definitely losing accessibility and that\u2019s a huge thing right now, especially in this country, whether it\u2019s libraries being defunded, book bannings happening, one person saying let\u2019s get rid of 200 books because I don\u2019t want my child to read diverse authors.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time when you\u2019re looking, for example, at kid lit, a 14- or 15-year-old is not going to be able to buy maybe a $19.99 or $21.99 hardcover YA book, especially if they\u2019re working a minimum-wage or babysitting job, so it becomes fully inaccessible whereas they could have just gone and picked something up like a mass-market paperback. That affordability was huge. It\u2019s sad to see.\u201d<\/p>\n While paperback books existed earlier, the revolution truly began in 1935 with Allen Lane\u2019s Penguin Books in Britain, purportedly inspired by his frustration at finding nothing decent to read at a railway station. He introduced colour-coded genres such as orange for fiction, green for crime and sold them through non-bookstore outlets like WH Smith newsstands and tobacco shops.<\/p>\n The format migrated to the US in 1939 with Pocket Books, and took off during the second world war when the US military distributed millions of \u201cArmed Services Editions\u201d to troops. This programme fostered a massive increase in literacy and an appetite for the format among returning veterans. Postwar paperbacks, often called \u201cpulps\u201d, were known for their lurid, racy cover art to attract commuters and casual shoppers.<\/p>\n Paula Rabinowitz, a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of American Pulp, argues the format\u2019s genius was its physical intimacy and portability.<\/p>\n \u201cIt generated a new technological explosion of this form of mass reading,\u201d she says. \u201cThe whole idea was to make the books no more expensive than a package of cigarettes at 25 cents and they were often sold outside of bookstores. I consider it one of the significant technological interventions, certainly of the 20th century.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not like the atomic bomb but it was about accessible, democratising technology that was portable, that was ownable, so for the first time working people could have their own libraries, and that was transferable because since it only cost a quarter, you might give a book to a friend and pass it on. It was something that was open to anybody because young people had a quarter; almost anybody had an extra quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Paperback books in the window of a drugstore in New York City, circa 1961.<\/span> Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The distribution model was key. Unlike hardcovers, which lived in bookstores, mass-market paperbacks were treated like magazines. They were stocked by wholesalers who replenished racks in tens of thousands of non-book outlets. This ubiquity meant that books were suddenly available to people who might never cross the threshold of a literary establishment.<\/p>\n This accessibility fuelled the golden age of the 1960s and 70s, creating cultural phenomena that are difficult to imagine in today\u2019s fragmented media landscape. Works such as Jaws (boosted by a Hollywood film adaptation), Valley of the Dolls and the novels of Stephen King sold many millions of copies. But then came the decades of decline.<\/p>\n The causes are manifold: the rise of the \u201ctrade paperback\u201d (bigger, higher quality, and more profitable), the consolidation of distributors and the digital revolution. The smartphone has replaced the paperback as the default time-killer in airport lounges, and the e-reader offers a library in a pocket without the physical bulk.<\/p>\n Brenna Connor, director and book industry analyst for US books at Circana, points out that the very utility of the format \u2013 portability \u2013 has been usurped. \u201cThese smaller pocket-size formats made them inexpensive and they also made them portable, so ideal for people who were commuting and also ideal for soldiers during wartime.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you think about the needs of what brought the mass-market paperback book to the market and then fast forward to 2026 and where we\u2019re living in an age where it\u2019s no longer as relevant today and that\u2019s contributing to their demise.\u201d<\/p>\n Connor adds: \u201cThinking about how a mass-market paperback was easily portable and could fit in your pocket, well, we also have an infinite bookshelf that can now fit in our pocket with our cellphone, whether that\u2019s accessing ebooks to read or even audiobooks to listen to. This digital shift is certainly impacting the overall decline in the mass-market paperback format.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>A paperback of Jaws.<\/span> Photograph: Alamy<\/p>\n There is also a shift in the book as an object. In the age of \u201cBookTok\u201d (the bookish community on TikTok), readers increasingly prize books as aesthetic artifacts \u2013hardcovers with sprayed edges and foil stamping \u2013 rather than disposable, yellowing paperbacks.<\/p>\n Bethanne Patrick, a book critic at the Los Angeles Times newspaper, notes that the economic logic of the mass-market format has simply evaporated. She says: \u201cNow, there isn\u2019t a need for the mass-market paperback because it isn\u2019t that much cheaper to make than the trade paperback. That\u2019s something a lot of people are missing.<\/p>\n \u201cI have seen comments on various social media sites and posts from librarians saying: \u2018Look, you don\u2019t understand. We know our patrons love them, but it actually isn\u2019t cheaper for libraries to buy mass-market editions.\u2019 They\u2019re trying to get their patrons used to the trade paperbacks and it\u2019s not always easy. Mass-market paperbacks have a huge nostalgia and convenience factor going for them.\u201d<\/p>\n But having grown up in the mass-market paperback generation, a time when \u201cyou could find great literature right next to a potboiler\u201d, <\/em>Patrick is aware of the cultural loss.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all knew that the general public had a certain interest or some skin in the game for what was going on in books and reading and now we\u2019ve lost some of that to people who are watching videos or gaming. I don\u2019t know how to win them back to the printed page. I wish that I did. However, I do know that they\u2019re not going to be coming back to mass-market printed pages. It\u2019s a shame because it was so easy. If you lost one, you didn\u2019t mind too much.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The writing is on the wall. The airport retail company Hudson began phasing out mass-market books from its convenience stores last year, limiting them only to a few dedicated bookstore locations. Even major properties such as the Bridgerton series are no longer being replenished in the mass-market format; once current stock is exhausted, they will only be available in trade paperback or hardcover form.<\/p>\n For Steve Zacharius, the chief executive of Kensington Publishing, the biggest independent publisher of the format in the US, the decline is not just about business. His father founded the company in 1974, initially publishing only mass-market titles.<\/p>\n Zacharius says: \u201cWhen January came around, my production manager, who\u2019s been here 35 years, called me and said: \u2018\u2018This is sad, it\u2019s the first month we don\u2019t have a mass-market book ever.\u2019 When the company started, we were entirely mass market. We didn\u2019t have hardcover or trade paperback when my father started in \u201974; it was entirely mass market and the print runs for each book were enormous.<\/p>\n \u201cI was looking over sales history at how the numbers kept declining from back in 1994 and then kept going down a little bit, a little bit, a little bit each year. The market spoke, consumers spoke that they wanted a change in format.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. \u201cWe were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.\u201d For generations of readers, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[3353,574,1001,10657,3546,23320,23321],"class_list":{"0":"post-45183","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-accessibility","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-goodbye","12":"tag-losing","13":"tag-massmarket","14":"tag-paperback"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45183\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}