Everything ends eventually.

[Tom Foolery]

RIP Paperback books.

I was gonna cheekily post this in the Celebrity Death Pool topic, but felt it deserved its own.

ReaderLink, the largest US book distributor has announced it will stop distributing mass-market paperback books after a steady decline in sales for years and even decades. Created in the 1930s by publishers like Penguin as a cheap, easy to carry alternative to larger hardcover versions, paperbacks reached the apex of popularity in the 60s thru the 80s thanks to writers like Stephen King, John Grisham, Michael Chrichton, and the ever popular Harlequin romance novels. But Since 1994, sales have steadily dropped from hundreds of millions of units sold, down to a mere 21 million in 2024.

Retailers like airport mainstay Hudson and others have been phasing paperbacks out for years, in favor of hardcovers, or the larger Trade Paperback format, which costs pretty much the same to produce. Reading habits have also steadily shifted as people use tablet readers that can literally store thousands of books on them, making singular paperbacks superfluous to regular commuters and travelers.

And we all know younger people don’t even read those. They just doomscroll on their goddamn phones or watch endless instragram and tiktok videos.

[anarky]

This is an issue where the consumer didn't choose the new format, but the industry forced it on us because trades cost more. Most books never get released as "normal" paperbacks anymore, and even reprints of older books are usually in trade size, so there aren't really many books to sell. So now they can point to sales of books that mostly don't exist and say "We're phasing this out because they don't sell."

Fuck capitalism.

[Tom Foolery]

And call me skeptical or a pessimist or whatever, but I prefer holding a physical, tangible copy of something in my hand.
They can digitally edit or erase any book they don’t like if the ideas in it are ‘offensive’ to whomever is ‘in charge’ on any given day. And then gaslight you and say it was always that way, or that book never existed. FUCK every last part of that shit.

[Diabolical]

I still love physical media.
I've tried reading on a Kindle - it sucks. I love used book stores.

The larger trade format is really annoying. They switched to it while the "Girl with the Dragon Tatoo" series was being released. The first and second book were the classic paperback size, but the third one came out in the taller paperback size and fucked up the series on the shelf.

And one imprint that I love, Hard Case Crime, a throwback to the classic pulp noir fiction, started in the classic paperback size, publishing long out print pulp novels, as well as new ones in the same vein. Then they lost their primary publisher and their publisher only used trade sizing.