Granite Geek: Another digital transition hits as the pocket book disappears

One of the greatest information-sharing devices of the past century is about the disappear. But before I go into Boomer Lamentation Mode and bemoan the decline of modern society, there’s another side of the equation that I’ll address.

The device in question is the cheap, small paperback book, known in the business as “mass market” as compared to “trade edition,” and often called pocket books after the first brand.

ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the U.S., recently announced that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks because sales are so small: They fell from 131 million books sold in 2004 to 21 million in 2024 with no end in sight. With that distribution channel shut off, the downward spiral will continue as few publishers are going to bother printing those books any more.

To an extent, ReaderLink’s decision just acknowledges a done deal because readers have been avoiding these paperbacks for years.

“Last year, mass markets were 2/10ths of 1% of our business,” said Michael Herrmann, owner of Gibson’s Book Store. With rare exceptions, you won’t find small paperbacks in that South Main Street store at all.

You can still find pocket books at used book stores, however. I visited two in Henniker — Old No. 6 Book Depot and Henniker Book Farm and Gifts — as “research” for this column (which cost me about $50 because who can leave places like those without buying something?).

Both those stores are awesome, old-time book stores with titles piled up to the ceiling on hand-made shelving. Book Farm has some mass markets, mostly in genre sections, but it concentrates on hardbacks and trade paperbacks. Old No. 6, on the other hand, has thousands of pocket books scattered among its eye-popping collection of books of all types, ages and topics.

Its mass-markets run the gamut from cheesy mysteries to sober literary classics to wildlife field guides to biographies, histories and popular science tomes. You name it, Old No. 6 has an example of 12 in mass-market form, sometimes in special plastic bags with a $7 price tag because the cover is so lurid that the book is deemed a collectible.

Running the gamut is the point of mass market paperbacks. They aren’t a genre, they are a conduit for the written word in all its forms.

“The paperback format started as a great democratizer, a way to make literature available to the broader public. It was part of the national mission to spread culture,” said Herrmann.

Doubleday created Pocket Books in the Depression year of 1939, when nobody could afford hardbacks. Sold for only a quarter, they were a hit and basically launched the industry. The idea really went big in World War II when the U.S. government sent millions of pocket novels to soldiers in the field to help them cope.

“It made people feel like human beings when they’re in those terrible circumstances,” said Herrmann.

Imagine that: the federal government subsidizing literature for the good of society. What a concept!

For the next half-century, mass market paperbacks were everywhere. Like many people of a certain age, I have fond memories of them, having bought tons over the years in bookstores, drug stores, grocery stores and used-book stores. They were so cheap I could take a chance on anything — over-the-top science fiction, the history of a place I’d never heard of, weird Eastern European literature, whatever.

Admittedly, they were often crummy books, hard to read with small type jammed up against the binding and pointless covers, littered with typos and, on one occasion, pages out of order. But they were cheap and small enough to cram into a pocket or read with one hand while holding a sandwich in the other. Since the words were all there, I didn’t care about the rest.

So, what happened to this wonderful product? The Kindle, that’s what.

“There’s no question the rise of e-books changed things,” said Lacey Brown, owner of Book Farm and Gifts.

If you want a cheap book you can hold in one hand, then a digital e-reader fits the bill. If you want something nicer, then print is still the choice, which explains the rise of handsome, oversized paperbacks.

“Things that used to be associated with [mass-markets] are now in really beautiful trade editions — romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery — all the genre books sort of went into the other direction,” said Herrmann. “The fan base is younger and more demanding than they used to be.”

That is why Boomer Lamentation isn’t appropriate here. Mass market paperbacks haven’t really died, they’ve just transmogrified into digital form. I can be nostalgic for the format that I grew up with, but that’s not the same as saying things are worse than they were just because they’re different.

I will continue to cherish the pocket books I own, including lots of Agatha Christies that my mom bought, but I don’t bemoan their disappearance. If nothing else, my eyes can’t handle poorly typeset books any more.

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