By Edward Nawotka
The mass market paperback once revolutionized book publishing. Today, outside of train and plane stations, and grocery and convenience stories, you would have a hard time finding them on the shelves. Bookstores hardly stock them any longer, save for a few spinner racks near the magazines. What’s more, mass market paperbacks have been rising in price as publishers have produced slightly larger trim sizes — ones that more closely resemble trade paperbacks.
In today’s feature story Randy Petway of Publishing Technology notes that mass markets are “not doomed,” but adds:
…it’s a convenience issue. Here’s an example — Borders are closing 700 more stores across the US. One of those is local to me. Now in the past, on my way home from work I might have gone in there to browse because it was convenient. Now it’s gone and the closest bookstore is eight or nine miles away. I’m not going to drive that far to look for a paperback, so I’m more inclined to buy it as an e-book. People are not buying mass market paperbacks as objects, they buy them to read. So they’ll go with convenience, which is to download with one click.
In addition, the genres that end to do well as mass markets — romance, mystery, thrillers — also tend to dominate the current market for e-books.
So, have e-books ushered in the end of the era of the mass market paperback? Or were mass markets already an afterthought for the book business and digital is just the final killing blow?
My guess: mass market paperbacks will last right up to the point where absolutely everyone who wants one has a dedicated e-reader or smartphone — three years, tops.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
7 Comments
I agree with you: displacement of paperbacks by e-books will occur in about “three years, tops” but ONLY in the United States. It’s going to take much longer in Europe and elsewhere – but at the end of the day (5 to 10 years from now) paperbacks will have likely disappeared from the face of the Earth!
I can’t say I’m sorry to see paperbacks go away. I never really liked them. At least we can (hopefully) look forward to a revival of hardcovers…Or can we? I certainly hope so, because I love the feel and smell of a good book printed on good quality paper! It’s a special and highly collectible object, something an e-book will never be!
What distinction exists between “mass market” and “trade” paperbacks in an era when more and more books will be produced via POD? I think there will still be demand for POD editions even after ebook readers become as widely owned as TV sets, simply because some people will prefer to read in print form and even ebook users may not want to take their reader to the beach or into the bathtub. But this residual use will not distinguish between kinds of paperbacks; all POD paperbacks will be the same, within the limits of what range of options for POD format are available. In that sense, the “mass market” paperback is indeed an artifact of the print-only era.
I always knew that “mass market” paperbacks were considered to be cheap knock offs of the hardcover editions, and they proved that they did not last long in the average reader’s hands; pages fell out, the spines broke, and the pages yellowed to much to keep them around long. I publish in trade paperback size because the quality is better and I can save on the cost of printing. I also print POD to save more trees. That said, I still don’t think that paper books are going to go away that soon. The market segment for ebooks still comprises only a few million readers versus the rest of the potential market which does’t own any device at all. I’d say, give paperbacks 10 years before the rest of the world catches up or stops buying them. But one of the things I am going to do from now on is to produce the ebooks first, because in my case the printed books are not selling, just the ebooks.
You discount: the collector, the specialist and a good percentage of a generation that will never adopt e-readers (cell phones and computers are foreign to them as well) and I think a lot of boomers are going to be around for more than 10 years.
It’s sad to think that you are mostly right because when it comes down to it, a badly produced paperback can remain intact and readable a heck of a lot longer than a CD; electronic storage, no matter how good, remains ephemeral and of course intangible.
Besides – some things ought to be harder to do, if only to keep out the non-serious and the riff-faff. You learn and assign value when an accomplishment is “hard”. Easy ends up meaning nothing.
I think that just as ereaders got cheaper, POD machines like the Espresso will become cheaper. When they do, we will start to see them in bookstores. Whether they print mass market style paperback or trade paperbacks it’s hard to say, but I suspect they will be trade because that size is easier to do in POD technology.
But I do think ebooks will be the dominant form for reading popular fiction and nonfiction. The technology just gets better and better, and cheaper, too.
“My guess: mass market paperbacks will last right up to the point where absolutely everyone who wants one has a dedicated e-reader or smartphone — three years, tops.”
Except for the poor, who always get left out of these discussions about middle-class toys*. They’ll be left with libraries… oh, wait, those will all be gone by then too.
*The class issues associated w/ ebooks are not about individual unit price, they’re about barrier to entry; an ereader costs more than many (most?) readers spend on books in a year, and many require syncing to a computer, which is an additional barrier to low income folks… the ebook revolution is really amazing for the middle class. And it’s also threatening to leave the poor with even less access to information than they have now.
I always thought mass market paperbacks would be the first casualty of widespread e-book adoption, but I also see one long-standing habit that might slow the decline of the paperback. Namely, people who trade paperbacks. They’re the pre-boomer generation who grew up passing around comic books. They’re the folks who, in the 1950s, saw to it that the average comic book changed hands ten times. Sharing is a social habit to these folks and you see it at senior centers, bridge clubs, and any number of social settings where they congregate.
I don’t think they’ll necessarily resist the e-book. I know one fellow in this demographic who owns a reader but still buys mmp’s because of the social pleasure he gets from passing a book along to others. He bases his purchases, re: paper v. electronic, on whether other people in his social circles enjoy a given author.
Is this group large enough to slow the paperback’s death? Hard to say. But they are largely retired, have disposable income, and love to read. And although their sharing didn’t harm the market stability of the mmp in the past, they might in the future simply because *every* purchase will spell the life or death of the mass market paperback.
We all know early adopters make an impact, but so do the hold-outs. I think it’ll be interesting to see how the latter affects the print markets and, should they migrate their habits to e-books, how that unfolds.