In 1939, Simon & Schuster revolutionized the American publishing industry with the launch of Pocket Books, a line of diminutive volumes (measuring 4 by 6 inches) that cost only a quarter; a significant discount at a time when a typical hardcover book would set you back between $2.50 and $3.00.
To make the economics of this new model work, Simon & Schuster had to move a huge volume of units. “[They] sold books where they had never been available before–grocery stores, drugstores and airport terminals,” explains Clive Thompson in a fascinating 2013 article about the Pocket Books phenomenon. “Within two years, [they’d] sold 17 million.” Thompson quotes the historian Kenneth C. Davis, who explains that these new paperbacks had “tapped into a huge reservoir of Americans who nobody realized wanted to read.”
This demand, however, created a problem: there weren’t enough books to sell. In 1939, the book market was relatively small. (Thompson estimates that around this time, America had only 500 bookstores, almost exclusively clustered around a dozen major cities.) To make money on paperbacks, the pipeline of new titles released each year would need to increase drastically. This, in turn, required a significant loosening of the standards for what was worthy of publication, leading, among other changes, to the sudden prioritization of genre fiction writers who could churn out serviceable potboilers at a rapid clip.
(Interestingly, this new class of writers included a young Michael Crichton, who, during his years as a medical student at Harvard in the 1960s, published preposterous paperback adventure novels under pseudonyms, which he finished by working at “a furious pace” on weekends and vacations. I’ve read some of these early works, and they’re mainly mediocre. But that wasn’t a problem, as the goal for many such paperbacks was simply to provide disposable distraction.)
Predictably, the new prominence of these lower-quality genres concerned the elite class. Thompson quotes the social critic Harvey Swados, who described the paperback revolution as ushering in a “flood of trash” that would “debase farther the popular taste.” There was a fear that the mass appeal of these cheap books would eventually lead to the elimination of the more serious hardcover titles that had long defined publishing.
Here we find a parallel to our current moment. As the platforms of the digital attention economy transition from social network models to providing maximally distracting short-form videos, more of the content available online is devolving toward that paragon of low-quality forgettability, commonly referred to as slop. Who will listen to a podcast or read a long essay, many now fret, when Sora can offer countless videos of historical figures dancing and X can deliver an endless sequence of nudity and bar fights?
If we return to the paperback example, however, we might find a small sliver of hope. Ultimately, the explosion of these cheaper, often lower-quality books didn’t lead to the elimination of more serious titles. In fact, the opposite happened. Vastly more hardcover titles are published today than they were before the Pocket Books revolution began.
A closer look reveals that by vastly increasing the market for the published word, paperbacks also vastly increased the opportunities to make a living writing serious books (which, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll define as books that require at least a year to write and are published in hardcover). There was, to be sure, a lot of trash put out during the heyday of the paperback, but this reconfigured publishing model also generated a lucrative secondary market for more traditional writers.
Stephen King, for example, sold the hardcover rights to his first novel, Carrie, for around $2,500 in 1973 ($18,000 in today’s dollars). This was a nice bonus, but hardly enough to live on. The paperback rights for Carrie, by contrast, sold for $400,000 (almost $3,000,000 in today’s dollars), allowing King to quit his day job and become a full-time writer.
King wasn’t alone; other acclaimed authors, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Ray Bradbury, to Agatha Christie, also would have never risen to such prominence without the opportunities provided by the paperback world. As for Crichton, we know what happened next. The nine, mostly cheesy paperbacks, he wrote using pseudonyms, helped him polish his craft. His first hardcover book, The Andromeda Strain, was a massive bestseller and initiated the beginning of a career as one of the most influential writers of his generation.
As you know, I strongly dislike much of the current digital attention economy, and I believe that most people should be spending vastly less time engaging with these products. But in the spirit of trying to end 2025 on an optimistic note, I find some solace in the story of paperback books. Just because a certain type of low-quality media becomes immensely popular doesn’t necessarily mean that the deeper alternatives will suffer. Over one billion TikTok videos will be viewed today, and yet, you’re still here, reading a speculative essay about media economics. I don’t take that for granted.
Saying no to social media is something I’m very grateful for right now. I think it’s pretty interesting what we tell ourselves in order to justify social media use. I’m a programmer so I was pretty motivated to understand trends and technology in order to stay ahead of the curve. For example I heard of bitcoin online in 2009 or 2010 and even thought it was interesting but never did anything with it. I always thought maybe if I had just known a little bit more at the time and been even more excited about it and willing to try it who knows how I would have done.
Now, of course, I can see how that sounds like the ramblings of a potential gambling addiction! “I ALMOST hit the biggest jackpot of all time if only I had been more informed! Time to scroll all day every day so it won’t happen again!”
And I think that pattern is similar for “internet gems” that you see every once in a blue moon. Make sure to scroll all day every day just in case so you don’t miss one!
The real gem is being able to accomplish actual things in my life because my phone and browser don’t hijack my life and attention all the time anymore.
liked your way
A few days ago, I ask Copilot “Are Published books today competitive with digital sources?” The answer was surprisingly yes with referenced sources to back it up. The history and demand for books still exists with digital decreasing. Do your own research to find out more.
Have you ever heard of Little Blue Books, Cal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Blue_Book
They were micro-books that in the 1920’s were sold for five cents from a [democratic socialist] printing press in Girard, Kansas (I am a Kansan). They essentially became working class literature, selling in the hundreds of millions and making the printer, Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, wealthy. But his wealth is not the point, but the success of affordable books showed people how important providing cheap books was to mass culture. They were printed on cheap newspaper, bound by two staples, rarely exceeded 64 pages, had card stock for front and back cover, and rapidly linotyped and printed to make production costs as low as possible. This allowed them to sell the books for 5 cents throughout most of its history.
https://kansaspublicradio.org/commentaries-news/2019-04-26/little-blue-books-a-kansas-creation-celebrates-100-years
As a social democrat, I am most interested in the politics behind both the topics covered as well as the idea that affordable books essentially changed the world. Haldeman-Julius walked so paperbacks could run, and now we have cheap ebooks and open access. There is no doubt that the culture of reading and writing has flourished from industrial processes that allowed for cheap af books. And now contemporary writers can benefit from low cost digital word processing and printing, by running a linux box running open source software and uploading their documents to the internet. It’s a golden age for readers and writers, there is nothing better than the surfeit of affordable writing.
One anecdote is that I love my Boox e-ink e-reader that runs Android apps. I am able to use Bookshop.org’s app and purchase from their $2-4 ebook sales. I am able to read fairly recent books for just $2. Couple this with my Libby and Hoopla account from my public library, which both work on the Boox, and I am able to read for thousands of hours worth of entertainment each year for less than $200. Bookshop.org shows that ebooks are actually able to be priced so cheaply due to the minimal production cost, but able to sell in such high volume to make the publishers and authors happy. It is just like the Little Blue Books. In fact, $0.05 in 1921 adjusted for inflation is about $0.91, and knowing that I’m buying Bookshop.org ebooks for $2 informs me that I’m almost buying at a Little Blue Books price point. In fact, these ebooks are 300+ pages, whereas a LBB was just 64!
The fun part of LBB is that they are now a majority in the public domain, so PD-adjacent projects like Distributed Proofreaders are actively OCR’ing scans from Pittsburg State University’s complete archive of LBBs. These are being posted to Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/486
We hope on Distributed Proofreaders to proof the 1500+ Little Blue Books that are in the public domain, and have a complete archive on Project Gutenberg. In other words, a free library of literature that ultimately created the modern paperback industry. Cheap books are really really really really really good for society. Cheap books put pressure on everything to be open access or close to free. This, I can’t reiterate enough, is good. We wouldn’t have open source if we didn’t have $0.05 books in the 20’s, in my opinion. Sure, they weren’t the upmost finest of literature, but I’ll take the open access and open source movement, the grandchildren of affordable democratic socialist mass produced books, any day. It’s better to price things at $0.05 and sell half a billion of them, for everyone involved!
Just another bad analogy stemming from mediocre reasoning.
ultimately, the effect of the new wave of “low-brow” paperbacks will have is twofold:
1) Vastly increase and normalize the prevalence of reading, publishing, and overall make the traditional publishing industry and process far more accessible and accepting compared to proto-BookTok. Still a win for thise deeper, more “serious” books out there.
2) In a phase of the world suddenly infiltrated by bottom of the barrel “slop”, appreciation for the carefully thought-out, long-form essays, literatures, and hardcovers will drastically increase. Curation and taste will become an ever-vanishing yet highly sought after trait/ability (this has already led to the explosion of BookTok/BookTube influencers who do all the digging for books deemed good for you, not unlike a motherbird chewing its food for their progeny).
while these are personal predictions, they’re not uncommon predictions/unpopular opinions, and have honestly proven themselves over and over again
Thanks for sharing! I also think that liberating myself from social media was the best, it’s easy to get hooked.
But I do find it interesting to use it as a port of entry to some realization that makes me go into deep work and focus. For example, I’m very interested in camping and Tik Tok allows me to search content specific to it, I try not to use the feed because that gets me into a never ending loop of interesting things that are meaningless. But using the “search” and only finding things that I’m interested in can allow me to deep the subject after with a book or an investigation.