They were already moribund - see the stats in the attached article - but their main distributor has said they’re done with them at the end of this year. It hits with a nostalgic pain, as I became attached as a kid/teenager to the Bantam logo…so much good fiction was (re)issued under that imprimatur and format, and I could afford it.
Publishers will go to more trade paperbacks, but realistically it’s the e-books that are already the likely culprit for this, and they are often cheaper than mass market.
I’d guess romance novels will take the biggest hit, though I didn’t find any direct statistics on that.
I will miss mass market paperbacks, though these days even they have gotten pretty expensive. I remember when I was a kid, they used to cost anywhere from a dollar for a cheap one to three or four dollars for a really thick expensive one. They were cheap enough that I could afford to buy a few every month even with my small allowance.
These days, I read mostly ebooks, though I’ll buy a hardcover or mass market paperback from favorite authors. As an indie author, I wish I could make mass market paperbacks available to my readers–I have to charge $16-20 for trade paperbacks to make a reasonable royalty, and that’s a lot of money for someone to take a chance on. I don’t sell many, and keep them around mostly because I want them for myself and to sell at in-person events where I can buy author copies and pass along the savings to buyers.
But yeah, they were a big part of my childhood and teen years, and I will definitely mourn their passing.
Mass market paperbacks are the smaller-footprint ones that you used to see everywhere–on racks in drugstores, filling the shelves at bookstores, at supermarkets. They’re usually around 5” x 8” and the pages are printed on essentially newsprint–maybe a little higher quality, but not meant to last for a long time. Almost disposable.
Trade paperbacks are larger (6” x 9” or even bigger) with better quality paper, thicker covers, and more attention to detail. They’re meant to be read and then kept for a longer time. They’re also significantly more expensive because they cost more to produce.
For the industry, the size of the book doesn’t matter. Mass market paperbacks are returned to the publisher by tearing off the front cover (or the ISBN code) and destroying the rest. It’s a violation of the contract between the bookseller and the publisher if you resell a book without a cover. This allows the books to be fully returnable for credit without the postage being too high.
There used to be “rack jobbers” who would service the spinner racks and supermarket displays, adding new books and removing and pulping the old ones.
Trade paperbacks are treated like hardcovers: unsold copies are returned whole and can be resold.
But physically, because of their larger size and sturdier bindings, trade paperbacks could contain more content in a single volume. For instance, I have the complete collected short stories of Arthur C Clarke as a trade paperback, and it’s a huge book containing 966 pages. You couldn’t produce a book like that as a mass market paperback..
Maybe it depends on what part of the industry. Mass market paperbacks are designed to fit very standard-sized racks in stores. MMPs are almost exactly 7" tall by 4.25" wide. I’ve actually made a couple of bookcases specifically to fit MMPs since you can fit a bookcase that’s just 5" deep in places where a standard bookcase might be a tight fit.
Try Book Outlet. They may not have the latest, most popular releases, but they do have thousands of titles available, all new. You can browse by genre or search. Shipping to Canada & US is free over a certain purchase amount and reasonable if you have to pay. https://bookoutlet.ca/
That got me intrigued: how many pages can a mass-market paperback have? I went to the MMP bookcase here in my office/guest room, and pulled out Hunter Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt, speaking of collected short pieces. 704 pages. That’s gonna be hard to beat, I thought. But a few books down from it was Barbara Tuchman’s opus, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945. 794 pages. And yes, they’re both mass-market paperbacks. Standard dimensions of 7"x4.25", standard (cheap) binding.
But then I thought I should check the MMP bookcase in my bedroom upstairs. Scarlett and Rhett in GWTW clock in at 1024 pages. Holy cow! But then I noticed Herman Wouk’s two-book epic The Winds of War (1028 pages, sorry Scarlett, try again, after all, tomorrow is another day!) and War and Remembrance (1382 pages for the win, at least in my house!). And yes, all three are standard-size, standard-binding mass-market paperbacks. So they could get pretty damn big.
Mass market paperbacks use smaller type, tighter line spacing, narrower margins and thinner paper than trade paperbacks so they can still hold a great deal of content.
But how many words in all those pages? If the pages are much smaller, there is less content on each page.
The trade paperback with the Clarke stories I mentioned is just massive in size and weight. For a converse example, many years ago Isaac Asimov published a collection of his favourite stories from what he called “the Golden Age of science fiction”. The total number of stories was not more than the works of Clarke, who was a prolific writer, and maybe less. But in mass market paperback format, they had to be issued in three separate volumes.
I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, but the first two “grownup” books I ever read were purchased in a drug store in the summer before my third grade year. We had just moved from NYC to San Francisco and I was running errands with my father. Since I was bored, I started idly spinning through a revolving rack of brightly covered mass market sf/fantasy books. My father noticed and walked over to pick one out for me (Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet with this intriguing cover). Then he told me I could pick out another for myself (Michael Moorcock’s The Runestaff, in my case chosen entirely for it’s lurid cover). Started an almost lifelong affair with browsing MM paperbacks.
With the decline of local bookstores I’ve been doing it less and less, hardly at all in the last five-seven years. But browsing MM paperbacks in bookstores was virtually a hobby for quite a long time. I’m slightly sad to see it go. I’m also frankly surprised print newspapers are outliving them, even if probably only barely.
I’d be really surprised if they had mass market paperbacks - I’ve ordered from their US website and from other similar websites, and I have always gotten trade paperbacks , never mass market. I’m pretty sure they get their books from books returned to the publisher - and mass market editions are not returned.
I offered up the site because it’s a considerably less expensive source for books. It was an attempt at being helpful. Yes, most books would be returns, but still new. They sell what they get. You get what you order. Whether it be hardcover, softcover . . .
You misunderstood me, I think. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with returned books - what I’m saying is those places have few, if any, mass-market paperbacks because those don’t get returned to the publisher. Retailers get credit for mass market books by tearing off the cover, returning just that and destroying the rest of the book , just like is done for newspapers and magazines.
The OP wasn’t about trying to find a source for inexpensive books - it was about the fact that the mass market format will be gone very soon.
For me personally, I have a much harder time reading the smaller trade paperback as I get older. Riding the schoolbus while in Eighth Grade they were very convenient.
Back then my local drugstore, practically the only place in my town that sold any books, used to pile up the coverless paperbacks that were supposed to be returned, selling them for like three for a dollar. If the publishers thought they were getting ripped off, they made it up by all the books I bought after that.
You’re right that mass market paperbacks are a certain size, but trade paperbacks can also be the same size ( and have been from time to time). The Big difference is their returnability: do you return the entire book for credit or just the cover?
The drugstore references, yes - Skillern’s Drugs in Dallas was in walking distance, and walk I did, just to browse the book racks. They had a couple of wall racks, never the standalone revolving ones.
