What Happened to All the Paperbacks?

If you have recently visited any major retailers with which you have been long familiar--a supermarket or convenience store, for instance--you may have noticed that the mass-market paperback section has shrunk, or even been eliminated altogether.

This is no isolated oddity--and no great mystery, either. The sales of mass-market paperbacks have not been eroding, but collapsing, for years. It was thus only a matter of time before retailers started cutting back on the space allotted them--or stopped carrying them altogether.

It is also not hard to imagine why this has been the case--and the explanation is not the triumph of the e-book, which, while probably affecting the kind of light, casual reading the paperback is associated with more than any other, e-book sales plateaued some time before the paperback collapse even began. (Sales of e-books were stalling out circa 2015--whereas the analysis I have found dates the paperback collapse to 2017, well after that point.)

The stagnation of the e-book, and the collapse of the paperback, if undeniably multifactor events, testify to what is, as with so much else in the world today, obvious and intuitive and yet something that self-anointed respectable opinion absolutely refuses to admit--that people are doing less reading of novels for pleasure, and less long-form reading of any kind, and maybe less reading of any kind. And this bespeaks the even more complete collapse of such reading--because if the light stuff is "too much" for people, and ceases to be part of their lives, you can forget their getting around to picking up very much in the way of "literature."