{"id":5578,"date":"2026-02-24T10:31:54","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T17:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5578"},"modified":"2026-02-24T10:31:54","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T17:31:54","slug":"rip-mass-market-paperbacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5578","title":{"rendered":"RIP Mass-Market Paperbacks"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I saw three articles on the death of mass-market paperbacks (MMPBs) in the last couple of weeks, I knew something was up\u2014and the articles said what was up, if not why: ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in the US, announced that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The piece from The Guardian<\/a><\/em> (an affiliate link) mentioned ebooks in passing as one factor in the collapse of the format. (The other<\/a> two<\/a> articles did not mention ebooks at all.) A Kindle Paperwhite is more or less the same size as an MMPB, and thinner. Furthermore, a lot of people\u2014Carol included\u2014now read ebooks on their smartphones.<\/p>\n

MMPBs first appeared in the 1930s, as a means of spreading book retail sales beyond traditional bookstores. MMPBs were designed to be sold like magazines: In drugstores, grocery stores, gas stations, dime stores, train stations, and other places where casual, low-value sales occur. They were cheap to broaden the reader base beyond trade paperbacks and hardcovers. When I first began buying my own books with allowance money in high school (1966-70) MMPBs started at 60c or 75c, with fat ones (like Dune<\/em>) sometimes 95c. (The obese 1970 MMPB of Blish\u2019s Cities in Flight<\/em> cost a stinging $1.25.)<\/p>\n

How do I even know this? I still have the books<\/em>. I have hundreds of MMPBs on my shelves, many going back to my high-school days. They look amazingly good for a peculiar reason: I coated most of them with my mom\u2019s ConTact self-adhesive transparent shelf plastic. I don\u2019t pull them off the shelf much anymore. When I have tried to read them in the past five or ten years, the yellowed and sometimes crumbly pages came loose in my hands.<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t surprised. Like the magazines that inspired them, mass-market paperbacks were intended to be read once and thrown away.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another issue that none of the articles I linked to mentioned at all: The audience is aging, and aging eyes often can\u2019t read MMPBs comfortably. I remember when I tried to read Charles Harness\u2019s The Ring of Ritornel<\/em> two or three years ago, that I needed my strong readers to make the near-microscopic text readable. And even then, while possible, the reading was nothing anywhere near comfortable. Ink fades over time, and type contrast matters<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve asked several of my contemporaries in their 70s and beyond, and they agree: The type is too small. It was small to make the books cheap. Now they\u2019re mostly unreadable.<\/p>\n

The answer is obviously ebooks. I don\u2019t buy print books very often anymore, and when I do, the size of the type is often the decision hinge. I have two Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, which I read ebooks on for a simple reason: I control the size of the type<\/em>. This doesn\u2019t work well on books containing photos\/graphics or stuff like source code, but print books like that are often twice the size of MMPBs or more. And I don\u2019t generally sit down and read print books like The Rust Programming Language<\/em> from start to finish in long stretches. I read them until my eyes start to hurt.<\/p>\n

Alas, the only serious downside to the death of mass-market paperbacks is that a lot of them haven\u2019t made it to ebooks and probably never will. Most of the short story collections I read in high school are just gone. Groff Conklin did a lot of good anthology work. Amazon carries the crumbling print editions.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Ebooks are the answer. My Galaxy Tab S9 is full of ebooks, many of which cost less than $5. Those old MMPB covers on my shelves remind me of being young. Sooner or later I\u2019ll have had enough of that, and they will<\/em> feed the dumpster. I just wonder what will take their places on my shelves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I saw three articles on the death of mass-market paperbacks (MMPBs) in the last couple of weeks, I knew something was up\u2014and the articles said what was up, if not why: ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in the US, announced that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The piece from The Guardian (an affiliate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,19],"tags":[17,16],"class_list":["post-5578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","category-memoir","tag-ebooks","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5579,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5578\/revisions\/5579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}