Publisher’s Weekly announced that ReaderLink will stop distributing mass-market paperbacks by the end of this year, pretty much killing off the format. I love those cheap 4.25” × 6.87” paperbacks, even though the ones bought from used bookstores or Goodwill are usually curled up and smell like pee. But there are very few bookstores or newsstands left, and those two or three people who still read do it on their annoying tablets or e-readers (me, I prefer curling up on the sofa with an actual book—I spend too damn much time on my computer and phone as it is). “It seems the consumer has spoken,” Kensington Publishing’s CEO Steve Zacharius says (not this consumer, Steve!). “Year after year, unit sales have steadily declined. It’s puzzling in some ways: with all the concerns around affordability, you might expect readers to gravitate toward a lower-cost option. But that hasn’t been the case with books, at least not in print.” I’m glad my writing career began and ended when people were still reading books—the death of magazines is a whole ‘nother column.
