Books

Saying Goodbye to Mass Market Paperbacks

The format that once sold millions of copies a week is disappearing, due to digital reading and rising production costs.
Saying Goodbye to Mass Market Paperbacks
The disappearance of mass-market paperbacks from checkout racks reflect a broader cultural move away from physical books. cabuscaa/Getty Images
Walker Larson
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Wander into any used bookstore, and you’ll encounter shelves bursting with beefy little softcover books. They are a little grimy, printed on thin, brownish paper, with small type crammed onto the narrow pages, many of the original 1970s and 1980s action-packed covers are now faded and dated. These are the mass market paperbacks that once littered the shelves near the checkouts at grocery stores, a literary format intended to make countless titles available to Americans at a low cost. They are  a dying breed, a neglected remnant of a bygone cultural moment.

At the end of 2025, ReaderLink, one of the largest paperback distributors , closed the book on mass market paperbacks. They’re discontinuing the format. The decision marks the closing of an age, and one more step away from widespread cultural literacy.

Walker Larson
Walker Larson
Author
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”