Yes, “read” as a noun is more about the content that the form. “Man, that story was a good read!” may compliment the structure, or the characters, or the action in the story, but it says nothing about where the words were carried (magazine, hardcover, ebook on iPad, whatever) or even such things as the typography.
Perhaps it’s because a lot of English colloquial terms - esp. the ones that have lasted a long time rather than being an in-group term - have that Anglo-Saxon hard consonants + monopthong sound that book already has.
And actually I can’t think of a really widespread slang term for car or house. Jam-jar? (Cockney for car). Motor? Wheels? None of those are used that often.
House = pad, maybe? Place? (As in “my place.”) Not sure they’re used that often. Certainly not like in the OP, where the slang term is used more often than the official term.
Years ago, critic John Simon used to complain about the use of the word “movie,” on the grounds that the word seemed like a silly, affectionate nickname for a serious art form. Simon, of course, preferred the word “film.”
And he pointed out, correctly, that there is no similar word for a book. No one, Simon said, would ever refer to a book as a “printie.”
But as many people have pointed out, there are numerous nicknames for TYPES of books, or for literary genres… from “Whodunit” for a mystery. to “Horse Opera” for a Western.
But “film” is slang, too, since it actually refers to the medium itself. Moving Picture was fairly synonymous to e-book, for which “movie” is a natural short just as “talkie” was,
Just wait, however. We’ll soon be hearing about printed e-books. 
“Car” is a bit of a colloquialism. If I were being very formal I’d say “automobile”.
“He bummed a fag…” Hopefully you don’t even hear that in an English public school nowadays. 
The best source of this sort of thing is really snarky book reviews. Potboiler is the best, indicating an unimaginative formulaic book. Paperback has connotations, since the cheaper novels tended to be published, especially decades ago, in paperback. Dime-store paperback is a refinement of the concept. (Look up lyrics for The Beatles’ Paperback Writer.) Tome carries the implication of old and musty, suggesting as a novel it is tedious and moldy, possibly pretentious, more suited as a paperweight than an enjoyable read.
I always assumed *pomme de terre *was the name because raw potatoes when cut look inside just like apples - even though they don’t taste the same and are a lot firmer than most apples. Still better than Frites Liberte.
Not quite. There are two German words:
Kartoffel, derived from the italian Tartuffe for the truffle (because it’s also buried in the earth)
Erdapfel - which translates to earth apple (not hearth).
And potato, like batate, simply derives from the Indian native word for it.
Almost all European languages either imported the Indian word or used an analogy to describe this thing that grows in the earth. And a potato is closer to an apple than to a root in appearance.
I noted this before, then realized ‘car’ is a shorter form of ‘motorcar’. Now ‘car’ has a history as a wheeled vehicle, so it’s not really slang.
Are those used equally everywhere (in the German-speaking world), or is there a regional preference?
“Digs” comes up now and then.
It’s usually a magazine or tabloid that’s referred to as a “rag,” but I’ve heard cheap paperback books called rags. Not often enough that it counts as real slang.
Kartoffel is the main and official word, but the other names like Erdäpfel oder Grundbirn and dialect variations are indeed distributed regionally, so a linguist can determine what region a person comes from by what dialect word for potato he uses.
It has even spread East:
- Kartoffel is used nowadays as derisive nickname from Turkish-descent kids against German kids in schools.
I thought car was originally short for ‘carriage’? You can say ‘railway car’ as well as ‘motor car’.
Well now it’s in the slang category, maybe. I recalled something about ‘car’ deriving from ‘cart’ in other languages, didn’t think about the ‘carriage’ aspect. But wouldn’t ‘carriage’ derive from ‘carry’? I think we need the etymologists to look at this one.
Maybe so. I don’t use the verb “to bum” very often (if ever), so I may have been using it incorrectly here. Still, using “smoke” as slang for “cigarette” is parallel to using “bouquin” as slang for “livre”.
And I don’t smoke. This has nothing to the verb ‘to bum’ specifically; I was just pointing out the common English construction of <subject><verb><indirect object><direct object>: <Bob><bought><(for) me><a book>.
Neither do I. 
The word “smoke” for “cigarette” was just the first example that popped into my mind.
From dictionary.com:
Origin:
1350–1400; Middle English carre < Anglo-French < Late Latin carra (feminine singular), Latin carra, neuter plural of carrum, variant of carrus < Celtic; compare Old Irish carr wheeled vehicle
“Can you bum me a smoke” means “can you give/lend me a smoke” in my dialect. It’s like “borrow” in that sense. “Can you borrow me a buck” means “Can you lend me a dollar” in some “non-prestige” dialects. That’s how people in my neighborhood talk, for instance. There’s no confusion.
True in this case…but just because a word has a “history” (nearly all do, and most are known at least as far back as the Gallo-Roman ‘carrus’) doesn’t mean it’s not “slang”.
In other words, mamy slang words are neologisms, but many are not (if by “slang” we mean “very informal speech, especially if used by a particular group”).
I would say paperback is the informal word for book. In general terms I think of a paperback as cheap, disposable, light entertainment.
A book is something more formal. Hemingway & Tolstoy wrote books. Stephen King & Tom Clancy write paperbacks.
Yes, I’m sure with effort you can find literary classic in paperback bindings. But my perception is paperbacks are a broader, more commercial type of writing. I would never waste $25 for a hard back Clancy novel. Clancy=$9.99 paperback in my mind. Tolstoy=$30 hard back