The Late, Great Mass Market Paperback

I have to take a minute to mourn the late, great mass market paperback.

My parents refused to buy me books when I was a kid.  They were passionate about the public library, and for a while I was too.  I used to run my little hands over the spines of those decrepit books, imagining who had checked out the titles before me.  Reading used books made me feel like a member of a secret society.

Then I started getting gift cards for bookstores.  From age 12 to about age 22 (when birthday presents kind of petered out) I think I kept several bookstores from going out of business.  I definitely kept several of them open after hours.

Deciding how to spend my gift cards was a major process, and I took it very seriously.  I'd hoard my gift cards until I had about $100 amassed, and then I'd go to the bookstore and buy every new book that my favorite authors had come out with in the past year.  It that didn't blow through my cash, I'd then have to decide on a new author, which I found exhausting and thrilling at the same time.  That process, believe it or not, has become only more exhausting and thrilling over the years.

Which is where the mass market paperback comes in.  For many years, mass market was the preferred format for publishing all genre fiction and a lot of regular fiction, too.  They might as well have been called "teenage" editions, because they were mainly used for sci-fi, fantasy, romance and other genres consumed in large part by teens or by bulk readers.  The existence of mass market paperbacks - which cost half of a regular paperback - doubled the amount of reading I could get for my buck.  They also guaranteed that I discovered a lot of authors whom I might never otherwise have read.

It's interesting to me how many publishers seem to treat books as a good for which the demand is price inelastic. Readers will always read books, the thinking seems to go.  This isn't true, nor does it even remotely qualify as a business strategy.  When you read in volume, like I always have, price becomes very, very important.  In some cases, price is a determining variable.  It seems crass, but it turns out you can put a price tag on good literature.

The price I am willing to pay for a book depends upon the value I expect from it.  With any book that I'm reading for the first time (and I never buy books I've already read) the expected value oscillates on a relatively set scale.  Out of the many, many books I've read in my life, I'd say about 5 per cent were so enjoyable that I would have paid $30 for them, which is roughly the price of a mint condition hardcover in the US.  Another 15 per cent were so awful that $1 would have been too much.  The other 80% fell somewhere between $5 and $15 in value, weighted towards the cheaper end.

Since I never know what category a book will fall into until after I've read it, the price I'm willing to pay is around $7.60.  Now that's for a book that I'm buying that I'm reasonably sure that I will like.  The expected value of a book by an author I know I like is much higher, which means that I'm willing to pay more for that book.  But it also means that the other books - the undiscovered ones - have to be even cheaper in order to fit within a $100 constraint, if they plan to compete with the books I like.

Which is why MMPBs, which were around $6-$7 when I was young, were ideal.  They were also, unfortunately, rare in the world outside of genre fiction.  This is unfortunate for all involved.  

What's weird is the way online retailers price ebooks.  I'm not a purist - I'll happily read an ebook if its's cheap and readily available.  You can't beat the convenience of reading e books on a device like the iPad. 

According to numerous publishers, the reason for not discounting ebooks is that they don't want consumers to start thinking that the price of a book is $2.50, or whatever it would be if the price of an ebook roughly covered the cost of production and a reasonable margin.  This point would be valid if print books and ebooks competed with each other, which is a faulty assumption to begin with since the two are consumed under very different circumstances.

Book piracy, previously restricted to the dubious guys camped outside Connaught Place with their shrink-wrapped paperbacks, is exploding along with sales of Kindles, iPads, etc.  It's now possible to get most popular contemporary authors for free on the Internet.  Ebooks and print books are both in competition with pirated free books, whether they want to be or not.  It's fine to talk about the morality of the situation and to retreat to tired arguments about art, but publishers are increasingly looking like the record execs of the pre-Napster era - arbitrary price-fixers.  This perception - us versus them - enabled the explosion of music piracy in the early 2000s, driven largely by passionate fans (not by vicious, immoral criminals).

What does all this have to do with MMPBs?  The existence of MMPBs acknowledged a reality that most book publishers, in the adult market, seem determined to ignore: that no matter how good a book is, money still matters.  Books should be priced for discover-ability and movement.  The way to spread art appreciation is not to hold onto a tired distribution model and the pricing system of yesteryear.