In 1939, the 25-cent paperback made America a nation of readers, delivering thrillers, classics and Pulitzer-winning books. So why did the Big Five publishers just kill the mass market paperback?
The cheap mass-market paperback gave us a truly popular yet sophisticated literary culture. Its decline has at least as much to do with corporate consolidation as shifting consumer preferences. (Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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It seems every week a new piece about the decline and fall of the American reading habit goes viral. The idea that we’re entering a literary apocalypse that threatens to destabilize our democracy is perhaps overstated, but nobody is denying the book-reading trend is grim. In the most recent international assessment of adult skills, conducted in 2023, 28 percent of American adults scored at or below the lowest level of literacy — up from 19 percent just six years earlier. By one widely cited estimate, more than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level.
