It seems every week a new piece about the decline and fall of the American reading habit goes viral. The idea that we’re entering a literary apocalypse that threatens to destabilize our democracy is perhaps overstated, but nobody is denying the book-reading trend is grim. In the most recent international assessment of adult skills, conducted in 2023, 28 percent of American adults scored at or below the lowest level of literacy — up from 19 percent just six years earlier. By one widely cited estimate, more than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level.
It’s interesting to note that these hand-wringing, sky-is-falling pieces unfailingly focus on external issues. Few of us doubt what we feel in our bones to be true — that long-form reading is being harmed by disruptive technologies and other beyond-our-control societal issues (political dysfunction and a decrepit educational system) that apply to the demand side of the equation.
But what about the supply side? Could it be that corporatized publishing — with all of its consolidations and centralization — may have enshittified the product to the point where it has abetted the decline in consumer demand?
Consider the death of the mass-market paperback last year. When the Big Five publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster) took the most affordable book format in America — known for its modest price and compact size — off of life support in 2025, it had long ago failed to live up to the “mass” part of its name. At that point, the books under that banner were recognizable but lacking the vitality and freshness that had first driven them to national attention in the twentieth century.
Until the 1940s, book retail was dominated by hardcovers — books held between cloth- or paper-covered boards, the pages secured by sewn spines. Penguin in the UK and Pocket Books here in the United States were the first to make successful use of an alternative book format that rivaled — and, for many decades, far outsold — the hardback. This cheaper-to-manufacture book had a soft cover and relied upon a glued (versus stitched) binding. The resulting tome was easier to carry and much easier to afford. The new format was as much commercial opportunism as it was any attempt to democratize reading or to improve the citizenry’s understanding of the world. If you make a dime on each purchase of one hundred thousand paperbacks, that’s more than making a buck each on 2,500 hardcovers, which was the average unit sale back then. Better yet, these books were sold all over middle America — in drugstores, grocery stores, and gas stations — not just in the little metropolitan oases.
A 1939 ad for mass-market paperbacks in The New York Times
In the post–Great Depression years, American bookstores were hardly ubiquitous. Large metro areas with a sufficient intelligentsia density might have a few, but in the 1930s there were only about five hundred dedicated bookshops across all of America. At the same time, basic literacy was nearly universal — by the 1930 census, some 96 percent of Americans over the age of ten could read and write — but the average American only knew books through schools (which used to buy a lot more books than they do now), libraries (which used to contain a lot more books than they do now), and catalogs (which used to sell a lot more books than they do now). Unless you lived in an affluent area with a bookstore or were near a department store or gift shop — which also sometimes had small book sections — you simply did not encounter them as a working adult.
But when these cheap little books dubbed “mass-market paperbacks” began showing up, they were a hit. America’s Pocket Books launched in 1939 and sold 8.5 million copies within two years. Which is even more remarkable considering they were not yet being sold “north of Boston, west of Chicago, or south of Washington [DC].” The books were averaging close to one hundred thousand units each, with a population a little over a third the size of today’s United States. When the industry discontinued the format in 2024, the highest-selling new mass-market title — a Danielle Steel book — sold 53,000 units. It’s no wonder the executives decided to scuttle the whole thing and to blame the customer for it.
One of the bigger recent pieces on the supposed new trend in anti-literacy was an Atlantic piece called “The End of Reading Is Here,” and it was typical in its emphasis on the failures of the society that is degenerating outside the walls of the Big Five. The piece gives us the history of publishing from Mesopotamia to Ptolemy to Johannes Gutenberg and emphasizes the importance that our nation’s founders and civil war heroes placed on long-form print.
Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Walter J. Ong, and Alexander Luria are name-checked. The tech-happy media and educational industries are decried, and the system that allows kids to spend 4.5 hours a day on social media is called out, but nowhere in the massive piece is any shade thrown at the book publishing industry with whom The Atlantic, for 169 years, has been cozy, and to which the article’s Yale-educated writer likely — as with most staff writers — means to sell manuscripts over the course of a career.
There is plenty of good reason for gloom. We are told that 80 percent of elementary school teachers report that their students have, by kindergarten, received school-issued personal video devices. But the Atlantic piece contains no implication that one possible reason books and long-form reading are falling away, a theoretically contributory factor to the mass market’s extinction and the plummeting demand for books, involves the supply-side of the equation. Any thought that what the publishing industry is printing, or how it has been pricing it, or where it has been placing it, just might have harmed our nation’s reading habit is never mentioned. The writer has good company in blaming the people on the outside. None of the publishing executives and pundits that attended the mass-market paperback’s funeral ceremonies last year did any self-implication either.
“We follow the consumer,” said Dennis Abboud, CEO of ReaderLink, America’s largest book distributor, upon announcing the death of the mass-market paperback. “It seems the consumer has spoken,” said Steve Zacharius, CEO of one of the biggest publishers in the format. “As a format, I would say it’s pretty much over,” said Ivan Held of Penguin Random House. All this shrugging and hand-washing for the book format that, as one regretful publisher eloquently put it, saved (or at least forestalled the decline of) America. “I believe that mass-market paperbacks democratized America,” said Esther Margolis of Newmarket Press. “For basically the equivalent of a dollar or two, you know, you could be educated. You could pick them up at the school book fair. You could pick them up at a local gas station . . . You didn’t have to be an elitist.”
But could the mega-consolidated Big Five American publishing industry bear any blame for this state of affairs?
Consumer scientists have long understood that that popular habits are not just among the hardest things to break but are also very difficult to make. Many companies try to integrate their products into preexisting habits, but it’s rare that a company touches off an entirely new one, much less one at the scale of the mass-market paperback. Those 8.5 million paperbacks sold by Pocket Books from 1939 to 1941 were arguably proof of a bigger, more instantaneous habit birth than that of even the iPhone, which sold a comparable amount of their own product but to a population that had grown three times larger.
But America’s decades-long mass-market paperback binge (which in 1979 topped out at 387 million annual units sold) suggests that we, as a people, are capable of — and perhaps even prone to — falling into a book-reading habit. So was there anything publishers could have done to prevent the death of the mass-market paperback and the decline of our national reading habit?
In 1939, television didn’t exist, movies lasted only a couple hours — versus the days you can occupy through a single book — and even there you were stuck with whatever was playing at the non-multiplex cinema. You also had at best a dozen radio stations to choose from versus the cheap time-killing options we have on this side of the digital revolution.
The new landscape obviously comprises external demand-affecting features that exist beyond the reach of even the most powerful book industry executive. And judging whether books are more or less attractive seems like a hard one to quantify. Proving that publishers have gotten better or worse at designing attractive book jackets, executing motivating marketing campaigns, and delivering compelling manuscripts would doubtless be largely subjective.
But one aspect of appeal for which it is much easier to hold the publishers’ feet to the fire is range. There is a bigger story to be told here, but let’s take a snapshot and consider the first ten mass-market paperbacks that Pocket Books published:
Emily Brontë, Bambi, Dorothy Parker, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, a Victorian bildungsroman and a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Thornton Wilder. That’s quite a broad spectrum! Now let’s hold this mini-catalog up against the mass-market bestsellers list from the very month in 2025 that Dennis Abboud, CEO of ReaderLink — a former managing partner at a private equity firm — announced that the mass-market paperback was to be put out to pasture:
Comparing the first ten paperbacks ever published — which sold millions of copies in a very different world — to the last ten is not entirely unfair. Those were the industry’s ten priority titles of 1939; the latter ones are the ten priority titles of the industry eighty-six years later. In other words, decisions — curations, really — made by the companies. The former are effectively the ten books a person of 1939 was most likely to have encountered while shopping, and the latter are the ten books a person is most likely to have encountered while doing the same in February 2025. In 1939, we have adventure books, plays, poems, a story about a deer, a murder mystery, a prize-winning literary novel, and a movie tie-in — all by a set of authors ranging in age, if they were living at time of publication, from thirty-eight to sixty-nine. In 2025, we have only contemporary commercial fiction options, half of which are series titles (one of which had a whopping thirty-five prior installments) and by eight brand-name authors, average age seventy-four, plus two whose franchise author is a man who would have been eighty-six at the time of publication, at least had he not died in 2004.
There’s nothing wrong with pursuing safe bets: all these old brand authors and their long-established readerships are obviously dependable, at least from a quarterly earnings standpoint, versus Pocket Books’ unscientific, consumer-data-lacking, instinct-driven — albeit extremely successful — strategy from 1939. But given that variety is an important part of attracting consumers, is it possible our twenty-first century publishers have diminished the wider appeal of their product — for readers and potential readers outside the dependable boomer commercial-fiction core — even just a little bit?
As to affordability, ¢25 (the price of each of Pocket Books’ titles) went a lot further in 1939 than it does now but was still a consumer-friendly price point. It was just slightly higher than what our great-great-grandparents would have paid for a gallon of gas and slightly lower than what they’d have paid for a dozen eggs. In 2024, the format’s last year of full national distribution, a new mass-market paperback would set you back three times as much as a dozen eggs or a gallon of gas.
One might suspect that materials, distribution, or other book-specific costs had risen over the intervening decades. But how then to explain that the mass-market paperback’s older sibling — the hidebound hardcover — hasn’t seen an inflation nearly so dramatic? Today’s hardback novel has a cover price between $28 and $32. That’s 40 percent cheaper than it would have been back in the 1940s, and this is before a typical national retailer discount of more than 20 percent (and often up to 50 percent) for best-selling titles. In 1939, you could buy ten mass-market paperbacks for the cost of a single new hardback. In 2024, you could barely buy two. Which means that under the leadership of the Big Five and their equally hegemonic national retail partners, the flagship product favored by elite-facing bookstores in wealthy enclaves got cheaper, and the format with the proven mass potential got many times more expensive.
Finally, let’s consider availability. Even before the mass-market paperback was discontinued, books were being carried in fewer and fewer places. Supermarkets, drugstores, truck stops, newsstands, and department stores,had all gotten out of the business. And the bookselling stalwarts of recent decades have been faltering too. In 2024, Costco, which used to sell millions of units a year, stopped carrying books in most of its stores. The big national book retailer Borders, with an assist from private equity, went out of business in 2011. Barnes & Noble has been roughly holding steady, but it has just around six hundred outlets in at best 19 percent of our nation’s counties.
A spinner rack in a Canadian drugstore, July 2026 (Courtesy Ned Rust)
The trends the publishers and the media cite to justify this availability crisis are real. But were they unavoidable? And are they excusable? And are they perhaps also driven by problems the two other As — appeal and affordability — over which the industry has even more direct control? Could and should the US publishing industry in fact be visibly exploring solutions or putting up a public fight to maintain a more significant non-digital distribution of its titles? Could and should the industry notice that the mass-market paperback is still for sale in Canada — where, in that same 2023 assessment, just 18 percent of adults scored at or below the lowest literacy level, compared with 28 percent here — and at a price less than half of what it rose to in the United States?
It’s difficult to see how the corporatized, highly centralized industry is walking away blameless from killing off one of its former darlings — the affordable paperback. Clearly it’s easier to focus on fewer higher-income readers than on a multitude of Americans whose lives you have no social connection to. Clearly decisions were made — ones that no doubt have had a major effect on American reading habits. And clearly the highly intertwined media establishment is not going to second-guess them.
But maybe you should.
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