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. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Applebaum was also once a publicist at Bantam Books, one of the publishers credited with turning mass market paperbacks into what he calls “a well-respected format.”
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. Applebaum says mass market drew millions of new readers who were not interested in paying hardcover prices for books.
Esther Margolis, another former Bantam executive who later started Newmarket Press, cites three factors that led to the growth of mass market paperbacks. One 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 was distribution, with publishers employing a network of more than 600 independent distributor (ID) wholesalers to deliver inventory to the same 100,000 outlets where magazines and newspapers were being sold. These nonbookstore outlets included newsstands, variety stores, gas stations, supermarkets, and shopping malls. School book fairs, book clubs, and bookmobiles later emerged to bring paperbacks to elementary and high school teachers and students, Margolis says. In later years, mass merchandise outlets such as Walmart became important for the format.
The final piece of the mass market paperback puzzle was the creation of a reprint licensing agreement that granted mass market paperback publishers the rights to books released by hardcover publishers for a term that ranged from two to seven years, Margolis says.
Both Applebaum and Margolis can rattle off the huge number of copies mass market paperbacks sold compared to hardcover in decades past. 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, Margolis notes. One of the biggest mass market bestsellers of all time was the 1975 tie-in edition to the movie Jaws. According to Applebaum, the edition, whose cover art closely resembled the movie poster, sold 11 million copies in its first six months.
While hardcover reprints were a staple for mass market paperback publishers, some also released mass market originals. 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.
Mass market paperback was also the format of choice for publishing instant books. Bantam published its first instant book in 1964 when it released The Report of the Warren Commission in the format.
While many of the mass market publishers ended up as parts of the Big Five, Kensington Publishing remained the country’s largest independent publisher of the format until it began pivoting away from mass market paperbacks about five years ago. But CEO Steve Zacharius makes no bones about the fact the format played a key role in Kensington’s success. Fern Michaels is Kensington’s all-time top-selling author, and the bulk of the 42 million copies her books sold were in mass market paperback.
A 1988 article in PW pointed to the vibrancy of the format at that time. The year before, 112 mass market titles sold more than one million copies, led by Danielle Steel, whose Family Album, Wanderlust, and Secrets combined to sell almost 12 million copies. Trailing Steel on the PW mass market list for that year was Sidney Sheldon, with Windmill of the Gods and If Tomorrow Comes combining to sell 8.6 million copies. Other authors whose mass market paperbacks racked up more than one million copies in 1987 included such well-known writers as Stephen King and Judith Krantz.
Though mass market paperback sales were over $1 billion in 1996, there were warning signs that interest in the format was cooling. According to BISG, mass market sales fell 3.3% in 1996 compared to the previous year, to $1.35 billion, and unit sales dropped 6.2%. Interviews by PW with industry players at the time put the blame for the decline primarily on the rapid drop in the number of ID wholesalers that, as Margolis notes, were key to making mass market paperbacks widely accessible. The ID market continued to consolidate under Levy Home Entertainment, and in 2011 Levy was bought by a former executive, Dennis Abboud, who renamed the company ReaderLink.
The consolidation of the wholesaler market coincided with the rapid increase of e-book sales. 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.
“It seems the consumer has spoken,” Zacharius says. “Year after year, unit sales have steadily declined. It’s puzzling in some ways: with all the concerns around affordability, you might expect readers to gravitate toward a lower-cost option. But that hasn’t been the case with books, at least not in print.”
Those who were deeply involved with the boom years of mass market paperbacks consider that period an important one for publishing and reading. “I believe that mass market paperbacks democratized America,” Margolis says. “Books and reading became popular in a way never before seen. I think how lucky I was to be part of its explosive growth.”
