When I saw three articles on the death of mass-market paperbacks (MMPBs) in the last couple of weeks, I knew something was up—and 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 link) mentioned ebooks in passing as one factor in the collapse of the format. (The other two 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—Carol included—now read ebooks on their smartphones.
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) sometimes 95c. (The obese 1970 MMPB of Blish’s Cities in Flight cost a stinging $1.25.)
How do I even know this? I still have the books. 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’s ConTact self-adhesive transparent shelf plastic. I don’t 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.
I wasn’t surprised. Like the magazines that inspired them, mass-market paperbacks were intended to be read once and thrown away.
But there’s another issue that none of the articles I linked to mentioned at all: The audience is aging, and aging eyes often can’t read MMPBs comfortably. I remember when I tried to read Charles Harness’s The Ring of Ritornel 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.
I’ve 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’re mostly unreadable.
The answer is obviously ebooks. I don’t 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. This doesn’t 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’t generally sit down and read print books like The Rust Programming Language from start to finish in long stretches. I read them until my eyes start to hurt.
Alas, the only serious downside to the death of mass-market paperbacks is that a lot of them haven’t 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.
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’ll have had enough of that, and they will feed the dumpster. I just wonder what will take their places on my shelves.
