(Long read)

It was the summer of 1965. I just turned 15. That August, I first encountered Frank Herbert’s Dune as I browsed the paperback racks in a small independent pharmacy on Toronto’s Yonge Street, north of Lawrence Ave, close to the old Glen Echo trolley bus loop (I can’t remember the exact spot).
I still have that now battered edition Dune, which cost $1.75 at the time. Within a week or so all my neighborhood teenager science fiction fans had picked up a copy. We were soon imaging ourselves as Paul Atriedes who was fifteen when the saga began. One weekend I and couple of friends debated the implications of the Missionaria Protectiva and Frank Herbert’s litany against fear.

For young readers and aspiring writers, the easy availability of mass market paperbacks in thousands of locations brought a world of literature and entertainment.

End of an era

That rack of mass market paperbacks may soon be gone.

The trade magazine Publishers’ Weekly has written an obituary for mass market paperbacks (at least in North America which is combined market) Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks. A major distributor ReaderLink has decided to discontinue distribution of mass market paperbacks due to declining sales.

When I was a kid in the 60s, I was always able to get the very latest science fiction release in my local convenience store, Willers on Yonge Street just north of Lawrence. I’d usually drop by on my way home from Lawrence Park Collegiate and browse. Teenagers with inquiring minds and limited income could check out the local variety stores, drug stores and smoke shops every week. You could browse a wide variety of mass market paper backs usually on tiered, rotating, wire spinner racks.

Boomer readers
For the boomer generation and Generation X, those racks opened new worlds of both fiction and nonfiction, not just science fiction, but westerns, crime novels and later as they took off, romance novels. Almost all of those were paperback originals. You had to wait a year after a major hardcover book to be issued in mas market paperback.
Going downtown to the up market Britnells at Yonge and Bloor or the more popular Book City in Yorkville was usually part of a special trip to go shopping, see a movie or buy records at Sam the Record Man.

Mass market paperbacks were also sold in gas stations, subway kiosks, airports and through larger corporations such as supermarkets, chain drug stores and department stores.

There was also the Old Favourites used bookstore with a huge inventory of paperbacks, some of which I still have. I first visited Old Favourites at its location at 30 Front Street just after my family moved to Toronto. I kept visiting it when the store moved first to 150 University Avenue and later to 250 Adelaide until it was forced out of downtown Toronto as the old office buildings and warehouses were sandblasted and converted or replaced by modern concrete, steel and glass towers. (A move my father was partially responsible for as the Director of Development for the City of Toronto).

As Old Favourites says on its website

After several years this location was slated for a parking lot and Old Favorites was looking for a new home again. We then moved into our largest location at 150 University Ave.
Old Favorites had become a hot spot for artists, researchers, writers and book lovers to meet, talk, browse and shop for their favorites. Old Favorites found its niche in the hearts of Torontonians and book lover’s worldwide.
150 University Ave. was in the basement of the old Regal Card Building at the North West corner of University Ave and King Street. This location was by far our largest with over 10,000 square feet of BOOKS! BOOKS! BOOKS! Old Favorites had not only become one of the most popular out of print bookstore, but it had become the largest Used, Out-of Print and Antiquarian book dealers in Canada.

Publishers Weekly says:

Jacqueline Susann’s megahit Valley of the Dolls sold 300,000 hardcovers in 1966, while the Bantam paperback sold four million in its first week on sale in 1967, and more than eight million in its first year… One of the biggest mass market bestsellers of all time was the 1975 tie-in edition to the movie Jaws.,, the edition, whose cover art closely resembled the movie poster, sold 11 million copies in its first six months.

A new paperback of Dune is on the newsstands in my local grocery store, listed as the number one bestseller, for $14.99 (Cdn), which given inflation is slightly cheaper than what I paid for the original. According to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator $1.75 in 1965 would be $16.89 in 2026.

Publishers Weekly says:

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units.

As a grumpy old writer, I know the times they are changing yet again. Vale! Mass market paperback. (That’s Latin for a combined meaning of goodbye, farewell and depending on the context, for those who have passed a tribute and for those who are living as one website notes(the Roman equivalent of “Live long and prosper”).

There were the various local “smoke shops” that had more to offer. There was a large store at Avenue Road and Deloraine Ave. That smoke shop (now long gone replaced by more up market stores) was beside a still existing Harvey’s hamburger outlet which meant it had a captive market for teenagers after school.

The smoke shop’s stock included a much larger variety of both magazines and mass market paperbacks, including adult magazines from Playboy to both books and magazine that were much raunchier.
There was also a smaller smoke shop on Yonge Street, combined a with sub post office, created under a program by Canada Post to support veterans. Its racks were old and seldom updated, although I do remember picking up the odd science fiction paperback when I went to mail a letter. The old vet had more dodgy material behind the counter if you knew to ask.

Ace Doubles

The mass market paperback spinner rack inspired generations of young would-be writers.
George R. R. Martin author of Game of Thrones blogged back in 2008

Aeons ago, when I was kid in Bayonne, I bought all my books off the spinner rack in the candy store on 1st Street and Kelly Parkway. Paperbacks were the only books I could afford and even they were horrendously expensive. Just one book cost as much as three comic books and a Milky Way bar: 35 whole cents. For that kind of money, I wanted value, so whenever I could I snatched up Ace Doubles.
“Two Complete Novels,” the covers promised (two novellas, really, but “complete novel” sounded better). The Doubles had two covers, one on the front and one on the back (and often both had wonderful Emsh art), so you had to be sure you flipped the book over to make sure you weren’t buying two copies of the same one. The ‘novels’ were bound back to back, each upside down in relation to the other, and printed on the world’s cheapest paper, but it was in the pages of those Ace Doubles that I first encountered Cliff Simak, Jack Vance, Eric Frank Russell, Murray Leinster, A.E. van Vogt, Wilson Tucker, Andre Norton (and Andrew North!), Jerry Sohl, Damon Knight, Edmond Hamilton, Gordon R. Dickson, and many other writers whose work I soon came to love. There was a point where those Ace Doubles with their distinctive red-and-blue spines made up something like three-quarters of my library, and of course, when I began to write my own stories, I used to dream that one day I might have an Ace Double of my own.

I still have dozens of Ace Doubles that I first bought as long as fifty years ago.

Stephen King had a similar experience as reported in the New York Times. (paywalled)

Stephen King,,, said he grew up buying 35 cent mass markets at the drugstore…. As a young man, he bought every paperback novel by the thriller writer John D. MacDonald he could get his hands on — and sometimes books with “beautiful babes” on the cover.
Paperbacks were what King could afford, and it was “paperback money,” he said, that allowed him to quit his teaching job and write full time. When the New American Library bought the paperback rights to his 1974 debut novel, “Carrie,” it paid $400,000.
“We lived off that money,” King said. “I could write books. I was free.”

A trashy drug store paperback also inspired Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind

If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstore sells
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take

Why did we get such a variety of books to browse and buy and why did the changes mean the decline in that choice?

Targeted distribution
One factor was the adoption of production practices and manufacturing techniques used by magazine and newspaper publishers to print the standard 4.25” × 6.87” paperbacks in huge quantities quickly and cheaply. The second factor as Publishers Weekly says publishers employed a network of more than 600 independent distributor wholesalers to deliver inventory to the same 100,000 outlets where magazines and newspapers were being sold.

The distributors weren’t governed by corporate policies as they were later (and by algorithms today). The sales people visited the small businesses, the convenience and variety stores, independent drug stores, gas stations and rest stops. They knew what books would sell in which stores. I do have a vague memory of the distributor in Willer’s as the woman who ran the store picked from the distributor’s boxes the books she displayed on the rack.

It was many years later that investigators found out that in some cities in the US the distributing companies had ties to the mob, which is how the dodgier material ended up in the right markets for those books.

As Don Corleone said it was business. The paperbacks, like hardcovers, worked on the consignment system but unlike hardbacks, mass market paperbacks and magazines “returns” were just the covers ripped off because it would cost too much to return to the publisher. Then the unsold books without a cover would end up in dodgier mob affiliated used bookstores, which is why you still see on the copyright page “if you bought this book without a cover” it was theft.

A golden age

The mass market paperbacks brought what many call the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Almost all were paperback originals or limited run hardcovers for the library trade while the publishers made their profits when the paperback came out.

The same applied to Westerns. Publishers Weekly says. “One author who thrived using that strategy was the western writer Louis L’Amour. Applebaum, who served as L’Amour’s publicist, says that Bantam has more than 150 million copies of his books in mass market print, and all but four of his more than 130 titles were paperback originals.”

Paperbacks were a part of life in the mid-twentieth century. That brought a second hit song with different takes on the paperback originals.

The Beatles’ song Paperback Writer is all about the frustrations of an aspiring author who wants to break into the publishing in popular paperbacks. Written mostly by Paul McCartney, released in May 1966 and is said to have been inspired when he was Ringo Starr reading a book during a break.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

It’s a dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand
His son is working for the Daily Mail
It’s a steady job, but he wants to be a paperback writer

It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few
I’ll be writing more in a week or two
I could make it longer if you like the style
I can change it ’round and I want to be a paperback writer
Paperback writer

There were a half dozen major paperback publishers and dozens of smaller ones. Many science fiction and other “pulp” authors of the 50s, 60s, and 70s able to make a decent living pumping out three 60,000 to 80,000-word books a year (or even more) as well as short stories in magazines like Analog, Worlds of If, Galaxy and the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Those popular enough to break into the hardcover market like Robert A. Heinlein would make even more money.

Taking a risk

A publisher of mass market paperback originals could afford take a risk on a new author. With low advances beginning at $1,000 1960s dollars came the possibility of high returns if the books sold out the advance and made a profit with sales across the tens of thousands of distribution sites. Advances would go up with authors who had good sales, name recognition and reputation. With new boomer teens growing up, the publishers could also afford to reprint the backlist every few years for a new generation, sometimes with a new cover. That meant more money for both the publisher and author.

According to Publishers Weekly

When the heyday of mass market paperbacks was has been debated by industry veterans, but it is generally acknowledged to have run from the late 1960s into the mid-’90s. According to Book Industry Study Group’s Book Industry Trends 1980, mass market paperback sales jumped from $656.5 million in 1975 to nearly $811 million in 1979, easily outselling hardcovers, which had sales of $676.5 million, and the new, upcoming format, trade paperback, which had sales of about $227 million. And with its much lower price points, mass market paperback unit sales easily dwarfed those of the other two formats, at 387 million in 1979, compared to 82 million for hardcover and about 59 million for trade paperback.

The industry began to change in the late 1980s. The boomer generation were now working adults, so the publishers sensed they could make more profits by printing trade paperbacks, with a larger size and a higher price that the boomers could now afford. New technology meant that there was less of cost difference between printing a mass market paperback and a trade paper back. Slowly there was less emphasis on mass market paperbacks, especially with paperback originals.

Business changes

The Master of Business Administration, the scourge of all creative industries, book publishing, newspapers, music, television and movies together with computerized accounting and the cult of share holder value changed how publishers viewed the market and authors. Sales figures were reported more quickly. In some cases that meant a book that grew later was downgraded based on initial sales and returns. Many authors became frustrated if a book wasn’t reprinted based on early returns, then took off usually by word of mouth rather than advertising and wasn’t available.

The economic uncertainty after the crash in 1987 and the recession of the early 1990s began the consolidation of the publishing industry. The distribution system consolidated, eliminating the small distributors.

Computerized inventory control and increased emphasis on shareholder value and Wall Street meant the old ways of targeted distribution to specific markets disappeared. That is why today the mass market paperbacks you see in chain supermarkets and chain drug stores are all “best sellers.”

Authors in the United States are still bitter about an obscure tax decision in 1979 by the US Supreme Court Thor Power Tools which led the IRS to impose taxes on the backlist in warehouses. That decision only applied in the United States. In other countries, publishers also downgraded the midlist backlist to save warehousing costs and increase shareholder value. Without an active backlist that meant less money for authors. Books were declared out of print after just a few years.

The computer age

The introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s liberated many aspiring authors. I was just able to my first computer an Osborne in 1984. That freed me from my fumble fingered typing and let my inspiration flow. I was writing radio plays and collaborated on two nonfiction investigative books. With my computer knowledge and journalists background I was commissioned in 1994 to co-write the first popular book about online research Researching on the Internet.

It was also in 1984 at the first Hacker’s Conference that idea that information should be free and exchanged freely began to enter the wider culture. The hackers were mostly white middle class and upper middle class American males either in university or recent graduates, who had few worries about money. The hackers believed they had the absolute right to tinker, recode, rework the work others in the name of innovation and progress.

Working for free

The author Steward Brand popularized the idea “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away” in his 1987 book on the MIT Media Lab. That same year, 1987 the movie Wall Street was released with the character Gordon Gecko preaching “Greed is Good.”

These two opposing ideas would collide in the1990s with the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web. All kinds of the creative artists and many of the smaller companies were soon caught in a closing vice.

The Cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Inpendence of Cyberspace a naïve and arrogant idea that the people would share information and there should be no government interference. What Barlow and the Internet Utopians forgot when they talked about an electronic frontier was that the actual frontier saw the destruction of indigenous cultures across the Americas. They forgot that under the laws of the United States “the public domain” was originally the lands that were the traditional territory of indigenous nations seized by the federal and state governments and settlers.

The fanatics promoted the idea of “exposure” on the web that would promote a creator’s work and fans would beat a path to their door.

Instead, the public came to believe that anything on the web should and must be free. Among the first to take advantage of the anti copyright and exposure movements were the corporations so they could exploit the creators, finding excuses not to pay for their work. It was the corporations profited off the infinitely expanding definitions of fair use in the United States and fair dealing in Commonwealth countries. That led to the widespread saying that Fair Use means Fuck You. The same ideas resulted in widespread piracy of all creative works. No one beat a path to the creator’s door.

The anti-copyright fanatics had a naïve almost religious belief that they were fighting big corporations. As they attended tech conferences, sat on panels with industry leaders, cheered new products and software upgrades, they were empowering the rapacious software industry, which was preying on smaller companies, absorbing them or creating new products to put them out of business. The same predatory policies devoured middle range publishers and record labels.

Many of the anti-copyright activists were academics, who at least in the late 1990s and through 2010 had tenure and so would never lose their jobs. They promoted an ideal of the free exchange of information. In books and hundreds of academic papers these professors did not hide their contempt for creators who needed income to survive and create. The worst culprits were the highest paid academics in the United States (and elsewhere), at least three cohorts of many intellectual property law professors who bought into the ideal of free exchange of information, limited copyright, widespread fair use/fair dealing and so in their papers and teaching worked to undermine the rights and therefor the income of creators in all fields. Those law professors never had to worry about paying for groceries, rent or a mortgage.

Now in an era where tech tyrant broligarchs seek more power and control the information ecosystem, the anticopyright activists are exposed as useful idiots.

It is true that some companies were hesitant or reluctant to embrace the new technology. That digital technology came at a time when both left and right were embracing neoliberal economics and shareholder capitalism where nothing else mattered.

A perfect storm for paperbacks

The publishing and marketing of mass market paperbacks was caught in its own a perfect storm. The market changed as tablets and phones made accessing books digitally through e-book and audio books, challenging the mass market paperback which had always been the cheap alternative.

Amazon and other online retailers drained the profits of big box book retailers and killed off many independent and small independent bookstores, again limiting distribution and serendipity of discovery.
Among the first to close where those that combined large newsstands carrying hundreds of newspapers and magazines, with large numbers of mass market paperbacks and some hardcovers.

Lichtman’s News and Books was another store in Toronto I visited on a regular basis, Lichtman’s was founded in Toronto in 1909 and filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

When I lived in London in 1980 and 1981 there were newsstands large and small near every tube station and on every high street. Those newsstands crammed almost everything from hundreds of British and European magazines, newspapers from around the world and racks and racks of mass market paperbacks. In my recent visits in 2017 and 2022, those shops had all disappeared.

The mass market paperback was tied too closely to the distribution and display of dying newspapers and magazines. In many cases, newspaper chains and magazine publishers were bought up by private equity funds, also called vulture funds, that drained the remaining finances and gutted staff, creating a death spiral that was impossible to recover.

As those newspapers and magazines largely disappeared from the variety stores, news stands, street side kiosks as well as major retailers, so did their stocks of mass market paperbacks.

As Publishers Weekly reported

According to the 2012 StatShot report (produced that year by AAP and BISG), mass market paperback sales were running neck and neck with e-book sales in 2011 at about $1.1 billion, but the two formats were on markedly different trajectories: from the prior year, mass market paperback sales tumbled by about $500 million and e-book sale soared by roughly $1 billion.

Despite the dramatic decline, the format still had some legs. PW reported

in 2011 that six mass market titles sold more than one million copies each, but that was down from 10 years earlier, when eight mass market paperbacks sold more than two million copies each and another 39 sold more than one million. As that trend accelerated, the format became impossible to sustain, with rising production costs and a reluctance among publishers to raise prices above $9.99.

And the Times reported

According to Circana BookScan, which tracks most print book sales in the United States, about 103 million mass markets were sold in 2006, the year before the Kindle was introduced. Last year, readers bought fewer than 18 million of them. Over the past decade, the number of mass market titles publishers made available in the United States dropped as well, but not nearly so sharply, falling to about 44,000 from 54,000.

Corporate consolidation

Now in 2026, the book publishing industry has largely consolidated into the Big Five. The music industry is mostly controlled by the Big Three.

The predictions that the e-book would replace the hardcover or softcover book never really materialized although e-book sales grew while mass market sales declined. The New York Times reported “Physical books still account for about 75 percent of book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers.”

A new generation will not miss nor mourn the end of the mass market paperback. Generations Z and Alpha will never have the serendipitous thrill of checking out a variety store after school and discovering a new author or an exciting new release such as Dune. The e-book market is dependent on algorithms and social media recommendations. Book reviews have disappeared from most newspapers. This week the Washington Post was the latest to kill its book section despite being owned by Jeff Bezos and Amazon which still sells a lot of books).

Is there a market for most writers?

It was back in 1947, just as the mass market paper back was taking off in the post Second World War boom economy in North America that Robert A. Heinlein penned his famous rules for writing including items:
4 You must put your story on the market
5 You must keep it on the market until it has sold

Is there even a market these days?

Authors today are struggling whether they publish with “trad” in one of the imprints of the Big Five or with small press publishers with low or nonexistent profit margins, some of whom publish just for the love of books. If authors go “indie” or self publish there are the challenges of taking on the burden of all the costs once borne by a publisher, editing, copy editing, cover and book design, whether to publish just as an e-book or try expensive print whether with a minimal print run or print on demand. Then the authors usually must handle distribution, marketing and social media. It’s a wonder that they have time to write!

Technology always changes. Big Tech has built Artificial Intelligence on the backs of creators by scraping everything on the web and the books that the US courts allowed them to digitize under Fair Use, proving once again that the copyright activists were their useful idiots. The digital world is already flooded with AI created slop, making it harder for real creativity to stand out. For all the promises by the tech lords and experts that AI might enhance creativity, the track record of corporations and the arrogance of the Broligarchs means it is more likely that greed and shareholder value will mean far less opportunities for everyone. Artificial Intelligence may soon create the “Intelligent Agents” Brand predicted but it is likely that the agents will recycle algorithmic choices, so serendipity is lost.

Notes

1. Although there were dime novels and “railway editions” the origin story of the mass market publishing is that British publisher Alan Lane was stuck at Exeter St. David’s train station and wanted something to read. He came up with the idea of a quality paperback book that could fit in a coat pocket and cost just six pence (approximately £1.55 today) The Dune paperback in 2026 costs a heavily discounted £6.10 on Amazon UK. Penguin Books are now part of the Big Five. In the United States, Pocket Books was founded to compete with the American branch of Penguin. Since the trademark belonged to that company the term paperback came to be used generically. In France livre de poche is still used.
   A mass market paperback fitted into your coat pocket whether you were on a train or bus and later an airplane. Just as mass-market paperbacks were declining came the higher security screening after the attacks on September 11. 2001. It was and is so much easier to stuff a mass market paperback into a pocket or carry on than a bulkier trade paperback. These days you can see a passenger reading on a phone or tablet or laptop. That all requires reliable WIFI if the book is stored on a server rather than in local memory plus fully charged batteries or plug in power. That mass market paperback could easily be read at bus stop or train station or departure lounge, taken in a bag to the beach, in backpack for camping in the bush, anywhere you want to read. That’s another reason it will be missed.
2. According to the Times, some publishers still produce mass market paperbacks for use in schools
3. You can see photos of Toronto’s variety, grocery, drug and smoke shops on BlogTo.
4. Old Favourites locations
   30 Front Street W is now part of the Brookfield Place complex
   The Old Regal Card building at 150 University became a parking lot and is now the Shangri-La Condos.
   250 Adelaide West is still an older building and largely an entertainment venue.
   n 1994 Old Favorites made the move to a Historic general store in the small hamlet of Greenriver just 30-40 minutes from downtown Toronto.