Mass Market Paperback Sales Collapse

The New York Times and the Guardian both recently noticed what many, many, many others (myself included) have been remarking for years--the disappearance of the mass market paperback. Evident to anyone who had even semi-regular contact with the inside of a grocery or convenience store this past decade Publisher's Weekly's numbers tell us that where there were sales of 387 million such paperbacks back in 1979 (itself a year of decline), the total figure was down to 131 million in 2004, and just 21 million in 2024. That is to say that sales fell two-thirds in 1979-2004, and by another 85 percent or so in 2004-2024, which works out to a fall of 94 percent for the 1979-2024 period. Keeping in mind that the population of the United States grew about fifty percent in this period the fall is even deeper in per capita than it is in absolute terms--more like 97 percent--such that where paperback sales averaged two a year per person these days there is only 1 paperback sale per 16 people, all as 2025 portended worse (with a mere 15 million sales "through October"). Hence the decision of so many stores to not stock them anymore.

Of course, faced with that number some may wonder just what it means, not least whether this is a matter of people's preferred format for reading books changing, or whether there is simply less reading going on. Especially given the stagnation and erosion of e-book sales (and e-book reader circulation) the latter seems the more plausible case, though I don't think the matter ends there. There is also something to be said of a change in the kind of reading that does go on. The mass market paperback, after all, thrived on the existence of a large audience of people who picked up books quite casually, for pleasure; of people who read quite a lot because they liked to read. The fiction market lived on the basis of that habit, the paperback a crucial source of sales and profits for publishers and their royalty-collecting authors because of their lower cost (for the publisher to print, for the reader to buy) and convenience (for they were a lot easier to carry around and enjoy on a bus or a train or a plane than a hardback). That's gone. Meanwhile in the days of a low-end paperback market, of slim genre series' of books, there was an important opportunity for an apprenticeship for authors looking for an in (not quite as much of an opportunity as in the era of the fiction magazine, but still, not nothing), and indeed many of those we know as writers of more prestigious works, in the thriller line for example (a David Hagberg or Gayle Lynds, for example), got their start and their training in this way, even if they tend not to list those publications in their "Also by" lists. That's gone too.

The result is that it seems to me that it isn't just a matter of people individually and on average reading less, but the disappearance of a kind of reading, and in the process the basis of whole businesses and careers. We are also seeing both symptom and cause of a decline in popular literacy--because if the vast majority of paperbacks were lightweight stuff, they were still practice, practice that let people keep up and even develop the skill in the best way of all, the kind that doesn't feel like work, as it led to some of them becoming more interested in more demanding material. At the same time, as people became less inclined to read for entertainment they found when they actually tried to read for entertainment it wasn't so entertaining, and didn't pick up, or lost the habit, with this translating not to their becoming more skilled and ambitious readers but the opposite as they became ever more dependent on streaming, video games and making nuisances of themselves to other people on social media to pass the time. And all the stupid boosterism in the world about how really things are looking up for books and reading and publishing in this way or that such as we get from certain outlets; and all the whining in the world about THESE KIDZ TODAY! by elders who for all their complaints about the young are themselves no better at this point, just as much a sorry bunch of phone addicts; will not make the hard facts of the situation go away.