Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes,” she recalls. “The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.”

For generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4in by 7in and cheap enough to be bought on a whim.

But the era of the “pocket book” is drawing to a close. ReaderLink, the biggest book distributor in the US, announced recently that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The decision follows years of plummeting sales, from 131m units in 2004 to 21m in 2024, and marks the end of a format that once democratised reading for the working class.

Romero, who grew up in the working-class, Latino and industrial city of Hialeah, Florida, says: “I don’t remember a bookstore. I had the library in Miami Springs across the bridge but in Hialeah around us, what was in walking distance because we didn’t have a car, was the Publix [supermarket] and sometimes we would get books from Goodwill [thrift store] as well.

“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ‘n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.”

Now a New York-based literary agent, Romero owns an Amazon Kindle, which is roughly the same size as a mass-market paperback but can store thousands of books rather than one. Still, she feels that something is being lost. “Whether it was the ink or the paper, they had a certain smell and it’s very nostalgic to me and many others.

“We’re definitely losing accessibility and that’s a huge thing right now, especially in this country, whether it’s libraries being defunded, book bannings happening, one person saying let’s get rid of 200 books because I don’t want my child to read diverse authors.

“At the same time when you’re looking, for example, at kid lit, a 14- or 15-year-old is not going to be able to buy maybe a $19.99 or $21.99 hardcover YA book, especially if they’re working a minimum-wage or babysitting job, so it becomes fully inaccessible whereas they could have just gone and picked something up like a mass-market paperback. That affordability was huge. It’s sad to see.”

While paperback books existed earlier, the revolution truly began in 1935 with Allen Lane’s Penguin Books in Britain, purportedly inspired by his frustration at finding nothing decent to read at a railway station. He introduced colour-coded genres such as orange for fiction, green for crime and sold them through non-bookstore outlets like WH Smith newsstands and tobacco shops.

The format migrated to the US in 1939 with Pocket Books, and took off during the second world war when the US military distributed millions of “Armed Services Editions” to troops. This programme fostered a massive increase in literacy and an appetite for the format among returning veterans. Postwar paperbacks, often called “pulps”, were known for their lurid, racy cover art to attract commuters and casual shoppers.

Paula Rabinowitz, a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of American Pulp, argues the format’s genius was its physical intimacy and portability.

“It generated a new technological explosion of this form of mass reading,” she says. “The whole idea was to make the books no more expensive than a package of cigarettes at 25 cents and they were often sold outside of bookstores. I consider it one of the significant technological interventions, certainly of the 20th century.

“It’s not like the atomic bomb but it was about accessible, democratising technology that was portable, that was ownable, so for the first time working people could have their own libraries, and that was transferable because since it only cost a quarter, you might give a book to a friend and pass it on. It was something that was open to anybody because young people had a quarter; almost anybody had an extra quarter.”

The distribution model was key. Unlike hardcovers, which lived in bookstores, mass-market paperbacks were treated like magazines. They were stocked by wholesalers who replenished racks in tens of thousands of non-book outlets. This ubiquity meant that books were suddenly available to people who might never cross the threshold of a literary establishment.

This accessibility fuelled the golden age of the 1960s and 70s, creating cultural phenomena that are difficult to imagine in today’s fragmented media landscape. Works such as Jaws (boosted by a Hollywood film adaptation), Valley of the Dolls and the novels of Stephen King sold many millions of copies. But then came the decades of decline.

The causes are manifold: the rise of the “trade paperback” (bigger, higher quality, and more profitable), the consolidation of distributors and the digital revolution. The smartphone has replaced the paperback as the default time-killer in airport lounges, and the e-reader offers a library in a pocket without the physical bulk.

Brenna Connor, director and book industry analyst for US books at Circana, points out that the very utility of the format – portability – has been usurped. “These smaller pocket-size formats made them inexpensive and they also made them portable, so ideal for people who were commuting and also ideal for soldiers during wartime.

“When you think about the needs of what brought the mass-market paperback book to the market and then fast forward to 2026 and where we’re living in an age where it’s no longer as relevant today and that’s contributing to their demise.”

Connor adds: “Thinking about how a mass-market paperback was easily portable and could fit in your pocket, well, we also have an infinite bookshelf that can now fit in our pocket with our cell phone, whether that’s accessing ebooks to read or even audiobooks to listen to. This digital shift is certainly impacting the overall decline in the mass-market paperback format.”

There is also a shift in the book as an object. In the age of “BookTok” (the bookish community on TikTok), readers increasingly prize books as aesthetic artifacts –hardcovers with sprayed edges and foil stamping – rather than disposable, yellowing paperbacks.

Bethanne Patrick, a book critic at the Los Angeles Times newspaper, notes that the economic logic of the mass-market format has simply evaporated. She says: “Now, there isn’t a need for the mass-market paperback because it isn’t that much cheaper to make than the trade paperback. That’s something a lot of people are missing.

“I have seen comments on various social media sites and posts from librarians saying: ‘Look, you don’t understand. We know our patrons love them, but it actually isn’t cheaper for libraries to buy mass-market editions.’ They’re trying to get their patrons used to the trade paperbacks and it’s not always easy. Mass-market paperbacks have a huge nostalgia and convenience factor going for them.”

But having grown up in the mass-market paperback generation, a time when “you could find great literature right next to a potboiler”, Patrick is aware of the cultural loss.

“We all knew that the general public had a certain interest or some skin in the game for what was going on in books and reading and now we’ve lost some of that to people who are watching videos or gaming. I don’t know how to win them back to the printed page. I wish that I did. However, I do know that they’re not going to be coming back to mass-market printed pages. It’s a shame because it was so easy. If you lost one, you didn’t mind too much.”

The writing is on the wall. The airport retail company Hudson began phasing out mass-market books from its convenience stores last year, limiting them only to a few dedicated bookstore locations. Even major properties such as the Bridgerton series are no longer being replenished in the mass-market format; once current stock is exhausted, they will only be available in trade paperback or hardcover form.

For Steve Zacharius, the chief executive of Kensington Publishing, the biggest independent publisher of the format in the US, the decline is not just about business. His father founded the company in 1974, initially publishing only mass-market titles.

Zacharius says: “When January came around, my production manager, who’s been here 35 years, called me and said: ‘‘This is sad, it’s the first month we don’t have a mass-market book ever.’ When the company started, we were entirely mass market. We didn’t have hardcover or trade paperback when my father started in ‘74; it was entirely mass market and the print runs for each book were enormous.

“I was looking over sales history at how the numbers kept declining from back in 1994 and then kept going down a little bit, a little bit, a little bit each year. The market spoke, consumers spoke that they wanted a change in format.”