The Demise of the Gold Eagle Publishing Imprint, and the Collapse of the Mass-Market Paperback

Some years ago News Corps' shutdown of the Gold Eagle imprint that once loomed so large in action-adventure fiction seemed to go completely unacknowledged by the media.

That lack of coverage seemed to me to bespeak not just the decline of the imprint, or the associated genre of "paramilitary" action-adventure fiction, both of which were fairly "old news" by the mid-2010s, but the broader displacement of leisure reading by audiovisual media. The more recent collapse of sales of the mass-market paperback generally--not quite so unreported as the Gold Eagle collapse was, but all the same, getting relatively little attention--is part of the same process. No matter how much some would like for us to believe that we are just reading in a different format the decline of the paperback seems to me indicative of the decline of casual reading, light reading as other activities replace it.

Like mind-numbedly staring at videos where so-called "influencers" jabber about stupid crap--and, in line with the cultural importance accorded to said influencers and said stupid crap, get far more press coverage than the collapse of the mass-market paperback has got, or could be expected to have got, in an age in which even the "JOURNALISTS" OF THE ERA DO NOT READ!