Mass Execution

As someone who grew up buying and reading mass-market-size paperbacks—and who still has myriad such works lining his shelves—I greet news that the familiar format is rapidly on its way out with regret born more of nostalgia than anything else. Here’s what Publishers Weekly has to say about this development:

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink [“the largest distributor of books to mass merchandisers in United States”] to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Applebaum was also once a publicist at Bantam Books, one of the publishers credited with turning mass market paperbacks into what he calls “a well-respected format.”

When the heyday of mass market paperbacks was has been debated by industry veterans, but it is generally acknowledged to have run from the late 1960s into the mid-’90s. According to Book Industry Study Group’s Book Industry Trends 1980, mass market paperback sales jumped from $656.5 million in 1975 to nearly $811 million in 1979, easily outselling hardcovers, which had sales of $676.5 million, and the new, upcoming format, trade paperback [first introduced into the U.S. market around 1960], which had sales of about $227 million. And with its much lower price points, mass market paperback unit sales easily dwarfed those of the other two formats, at 387 million in 1979, compared to 82 million for hardcover and about 59 million for trade paperback. Applebaum says mass market drew millions of new readers who were not interested in paying hardcover prices for books. …

Though mass market paperback sales were over $1 billion in 1996, there were warning signs that interest in the format was cooling. According to BISG, mass market sales fell 3.3% in 1996 compared to the previous year, to $1.35 billion, and unit sales dropped 6.2%. Interviews by PW with industry players at the time put the blame for the decline primarily on the rapid drop in the number of [independent distributor] wholesalers that, as [former Bantam executive Esther Margolis] notes, were key to making mass market paperbacks widely accessible. The ID market continued to consolidate under Levy Home Entertainment, and in 2011 Levy was bought by a former executive, Dennis Abboud, who renamed the company ReaderLink.

The consolidation of the wholesaler market coincided with the rapid increase of e-book sales. According to the 2012 StatShot report …, mass market paperback sales were running neck and neck with e-book sales in 2011 at about $1.1 billion, but the two formats were on markedly different trajectories: from the prior year, mass market paperback sales tumbled by about $500 million and e-book sale soared by roughly $1 billion.

Despite the dramatic decline, the format still had some legs. PW reported in 2011 that six mass market titles sold more than one million copies each, but that was down from 10 years earlier, when eight mass market paperbacks sold more than two million copies each and another 39 sold more than one million. As that trend accelerated, the format became impossible to sustain, with rising production costs and a reluctance among publishers to raise prices above $9.99.

“It seems the consumer has spoken,” [Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius] says. “Year after year, unit sales have steadily declined. It’s puzzling in some ways: with all the concerns around affordability, you might expect readers to gravitate toward a lower-cost option. But that hasn’t been the case with books, at least not in print.”

I’ve ridden these trends just like so many other people. While I snapped up mass-market softcovers in droves during my more impecunious youth, I long ago began plunking down hard-earned dollars for hardcovers and trade-size editions, both of them which are larger and easier to read—though they also take up more room in my cabinets. As a part-time bookseller nowadays, I shy away from ordering mass-market versions because book distributors such as Ingram (the largest U.S. company of its kind) ask that unsold copies be returned not whole, but with their jackets stripped off—a vandalization I find hard to stomach.

The bottom line is that I will mourn losing the mass-market paperback because it has long been part of my life. But it won’t change my purchasing. Nor will those once-popular works be far from my attention, as they are—and will continue to be—the principal focus of this blog.

READ MORE: “Why Are Paperbacks,” by Rebecca Makkai (SubMakk); “The Paperback Explosion: An American Publishing Phenomenon, 1939-1980,” by Michael Scott Barson.