Begin rant.
I don’t k ow how many of you might have noticed, but mass market paperbacks are pretty much a thing of the past. The major publishers have stopped making them.
The reason?
Ingram.
Ingram has pretty much got a lock on the distribution system. A monoply in other words. There are no more national distributors.
They get a cut of the price. Mass market paperbacks, while much more expensive than they used to be, didn’t cost as much as trade paperbacks and hardcovers. So last year, Ingram announced that they would’t be distributing mass markets paperbacks anymore.
The publishers had to cave to this demand. They had no choicde. It costs money to print books, just like it costs money to produce any product. If you can’t get your produc t to market, you’ve got a problem, and you’re going to lose money.
I’m not crazy about this change. I like the format of a mass market paperback. The size is convenient. I can slip one in the pocket of a pair of carrrgo shorts or a jacket and take it with me. An unlike reading on an electronic device, paper never runs out of battery.
Mass market paperbacks don’t cost as much to print as trade paperbacks. So, publishers could publish more books, giving readers a greater choice. At least in principle. In practice, maybe not so much, at least in recent eyars.
I read a lot on my phone or ereader. If the price is right. I’m not paying over seven or eight bucks for fiction. In other words, the price of a mass market paperback from a few (or more) years ago. I suspect publishers will raise the price of ebooks to match the price of trade paper.
I’ve noticed a negative effect already from this change.
I live in a small town. The only places to buy books until recently were WalMart and CVS. CVS closed about six or eight months ago. The book section at WalMart was shrunk to half its size. Most of the slots are empty or are YA romantasy. I like to be able to walk up to a rack of paperbacks and browse for an author I’v’e not read or heard of before. The experieince isn’t the same borwsing online.
Why do I have a feeling I will be buying fewer new books going forwards? At least there are a number of inidependent authors i can buy from.
As for paperbacks of the mass market variety, well, there are uzed book stores iwthin driving distance. And I have a rather large selection of my own to choose from. I’n noticed that I’m not reading a lot of new science fiction and fantasy unless it’s from a small press or writers I know are involved in the project. Most of my new book purchases have been mysteries and thrillers.
End of rant.
I can’t tell the difference between mass market and trade paperbacks, and I gave up tree books for ebooks years ago, so, no loss for me.
Mass market are the small paperbacks. Trade are the size, or almost, of hardcovers.
Damn. Sitting here, looking at my bookcase I can see several mass market paperbacks I actually got at local grocery stores. Like “Between Time and Terror,” ed by Dziemianowicz, Greenberg and Weinberg. This is the end of an era. And it’s a damn shame.
Grocery stores, drug stores, WalMart, Gibson’s Discount Store. They were everywhere. Each sotre had a different selection. The distributors knew who bought what books in each store. Westerns here, romance there, in that store science fictiona nd fantasy. Then all the distributors collapsed into one. All stores got the same books. They filled the shelved with multiple slots of the same book, usually NY Times bestsellers, not genre midlist. Sales dropped.
When the groceery I shopped at when I lived in Lubbock shrunk their books section by half, I complained to the manager. His response was he wasn’t selling enough to justify the space. Well, if each bin had a different title instead of four or five bins with the same book, maybe you wouldn’t have that problem. Several years later, they got rid of the book section.
I wonder how much of this is also driven by BookTok. I’m a middle aged male fantasy reader, so the vast majority of my library is mass markets. The one time I took a look at BookTok, I saw a young woman complaining that she “would never” with regards to “small paperbacks,” and that they gave her “the ick.”
BookTok is just as much, if not much much more, about conspicuous consumption of books as it is about quietly reading them. They can’t read a book without making a video telling everyone they did, and shelving them by color on their shelves.
Books have always technically been consumer items because, of course, you bought and sold them. But with BookTok they’re now display pieces even more. Mass markets can’t hold up to that new standard. The trend and the money is with pretty bound trades and hardcovers because of BookTok, because BookTok is mainly concerned with how their reading looks and projecting that into social media.
Just an idea.
That’s an interesting idea, Andrew, and I think you might be on to something. I’m glad I havne’t looked on BookTok.
Too much of traditional publishing is driven by what is popular with teen and twenty-something women because most of the editors at the remaining publishers are young women from mostly Ivy League women’s colleges.I’m speaking in generalizations here; I realize there are exceptions. They refuse to publish books that appeal to male readers, then complain when men don’t buy what they publish. There has been a lot written about that lately, so I’ll not go into it here.
I’ve noticed that most of the fiction at mhy local WalMart, the only place in town to still buy books, is romantaxy and/or porn aimed at young women.
And I think arranging your books by color is one of the stupicest things I’ve ever heard of.