Yes, coat and cargo pants pockets.
Or donate to the library or ….
Recycle books in San Jose did so well they opened a satellite store in Campbell.
Not bad at all.
No. It applied to any mass market paperback. Bookstores could order them. All books (with a few exceptions) are fully returnable by the store.
Since there was no market for returned paperbacks (I’m not talking used ones, which is different), they weren’t worth anything to the publisher. And it’s cheaper to return the covers for credit (probably it was changed to the bar code or ISBN number more recently).
Trade paperbacks and hardcovers could be remaindered and resold.
These may be two sides of the same coin. That relatively expensive hardback could be sold, traded, or donated, and lots of people might end up reading that same copy.
Same here.
They changed the entire business model. Books were something you owned and could give away or selĺ. The only restriction was copying them. That’s illegal.
Ebooks come along and say, “No you are subject to copyright”. Your one copy on the reader has to stay attached to that account.
The used mass market paperbacks will be available for several more years. It depends on how roughly the book is treated. My paperbacks show almost no wear. I don’t break the spine or flatten them on a table.
I’ve bought books on Ebay that were printed in the 1970’s. The pages had yellowed, but were fine to read.
Not in the three bookstores I worked in.
If we ordered it and it didnt sell, we just marked it down.
I have two glass-front barrister bookcases in my living room, filled with most of my MMP, and I will occasionally pull one out to read, but I find a lot of them have such tiny type I can’t read them with my old eyes, especially since for a lot of them the pages have browned and often brittle.
FWIW, I think some of what would be considered mass-market paperbacks are higher quality than others. My collection of PG Wodehouse novels and short story anthologies is in varied forms, some of it original hardcover editions, and some of those are valuable first editions, but a great deal of it is the Penguin paperback editions. Most of those are beautifully uniform, with identical orange spines and identical white covers with colourful illustrations by Chris Riddell. They seem to hold up much better than most paperbacks, but that may at least partly be because I take such good care of them.
I daresay a lot of the scifi MMPs of decades ago were of poorer quality because they were the era’s equivalent of penny dreadfuls.
Those penguin paperbacks were very nicely printed and bound. Mine are still in good shape, too. But my copy of the Lord of the Rings, printed as a mass market paperback in the 1960s, is still perfectly readable.
Neither do I (I think that people who bend the front cover around to the back should be treated the same way – it results in the spine getting twisted). But you can’t do anything about the cheap glue holding the book together aging, which is why my Conan books were shedding pages. Even my quality Penguin books ar subject to that problem. Only if you use good quality materials and/or sew the pages into signatures (as Dutton and Dover did) will they tend to hold up. And Dover books weren’t really MMP.
If you’re lucky and treat your paperbacks well, they will probably last – I have some dating back to the 1940s that are still in great shape. But if your glue has aged badly, even if the book appears to be solid, it might only take opening it up to crack that glue.
Most hardcover books are glued these days, not sewn. That’s been true for decades.
Then I fear for future libraries. My Dover paperbacks might outlast these books.
Once upon a time publishers sold “library editions” which were sewn, unlike mass market hardcovers, that weren’t. I have no idea if that’s still true.
Nicer hardcovers were sometimes sewn. Textbooks usually were. Now I’m curious about the state of the industry today. I have a friend in publishing, i should ask him.
“The Little Fellas”. Every SF writer, it seemed, did their own take on The Puppet Masters. Ever read Fredric Brown’s “The Mind Thing”. BTW the last time I saw a paperback spinner rack was at the dollar store. I also recent saw one for comic books at a auto mechanic shop, stocked with vintage comics, not for sale but simply on display.
I’m a huge Fredric Brown fan, and I’ve read The Mind Thing many times.
THis was his attempt to write a science fiction film, something that could be done on a small budget with no big special effects scenes. It would’ve been great, too, if someone had filmed it.
I sort of felt that the original Outer Limits episode “Cry of Silence” owed a lot to The Mind Thing (The book preceded the episode by three years)