Sigh.
It’s true that made market paperbacks compete with e-readers. They both fit in your pocket, and are convenient to read on a train or airplane.
I’ve never understood the point of trade paperbacks. Big and heavy and the spines get stiff and break in a few years. I like small, light books, that are easy to hold.
The increase in price they can charge is larger than the increase in price of production?
Many years ago I was at a quaint little New England bookstore and made a passing (dismissive) comment about trade paperbacks. The store owner described to me the multiple different non-mass-market formats that had been attempted to increase profits, and said trade paperbacks (of this specific shape) were the first to land, he thought because they felt closer to hardback without being hardback-expensive.
I really hate them because for decades my little gift to myself when traveling for business was to buy myself some ‘airport fiction’…but jesus these things are unwieldy, and I stopped.
When I used to read actual books, it was more often trade paperbooks than mass market for a few reasons. One is that I found them easier to read - the font was larger, the line spacing was not as tight as the mass markets , the mass market paperbacks tended to be thicker and harder for me to hold. Two, I couldn’t fit even a mass market paperback into my pocket and if I’m going to be carrying a bag, it doesn’t much matter which size paperback is in it. And most importantly, few of the books I read were even available in mass market - mass market paperbacks have always been mostly fiction, with some true crime and pop psychology.
Books used to be smaller. I was just rearranging my bookshelves, and i have a bunch of old non-fiction books from my parents’ library that are about the size of mass market paperbacks. They are nicely made books, too.
At the peak of mass market paperback publishing you’d get quite a few succesful nonfics in that format, but yes, a lot of the market was driven by lighter material. That included much direct-to mass-market genre pulp, heirs to the lineage of penny dreadfuls and dime novels.
“It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few;
I’ll be writing more in a week or two…”
Still will miss them, they had a certain charm. And I just can’t see the biggest band in the world releasing a #1-charting single about e-book fic.
(And whatever hard, soft or trade, with paper you don’t have to worry about the pricks at Amazon Kindle deciding you need to upgrade your reader or else.)
As a generality (everything in publishing has a million exceptions) trade paperbacks are printed using the same type as the hardback edition. The outside margins are made smaller so less paper is necessary, the stiff paper on the outside costs much less than the boards of a hardback do, printing on the same machines at the same time is possible if that’s wanted, and the lack of a dust jacket is additional savings. Trade pb’s therefore cost much less to produce than a hardback, yet are equally readable and almost as durable. Libraries will buy trade pb’s for that reason, invaluable free publicity.
Mass market paperbacks have several costs built in, notably the need for different printers and binders and the total resetting of the type, which requires another copyediting process if only to deal with “widows and orphans,” one-line paragraphs at the beginnings and ends of pages that are frowned on. Such costs were dealt with by using cheap paper and tiny type, and often cuts and abridgements that weren’t always announced. The only way to make a profit on a mass market pb was volume, volume, volume. They were printed in the hundreds of thousands, 20-100 times as many as a first printing of a hardback. Volume required blanketing the country with points of sale. Lose the volume, lose the profit.
With today’s technology, a trade pb can be made for as little as 30¢ more than a mass market pb, but can be sold at a much higher price, making up for the lack of volume. The incredible cheapness of a mass market paperback - 25¢ in the 1940s, 35-50¢ in the 1950s - made for impulse sales when you could stumble upon a rack almost anywhere. No racks, no impulse buys, no volume, prices at a much higher percentage of a hardback price, made their death certain, with only a few genres and their dedicated readerships of series and name authors allowing for volume sales of high printings still holding on.
All major publishers today are teeny-tiny holdings of giant international conglomerates, existing as luxury and prestige holdings rather than profit centers. Luxury and prestige items can increase sales by raising prices, up to a point. Trade pb’s fit nicely in that niche. Making more money by producing fewer items is nirvana for a corporation.
I find trade paperbacks easier to hold open in one hand. I’m not certain, but having more words per page, they may actually be thinner than the mass market version, even with the heavier stock paper.
BTW, anybody with hundreds or thousands of mass market paperbacks who like to display them should be on the lookout for when bookstores and newsstands start to liquidate the spinners and racks used to sell these books.