Via MetaFilter¹:

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units.

Now, no hand-wringing here. MMPs shaped me as a reader and person, certainly—but there’s no point lamenting what is likely just the first step in their long decline.

More importantly, this doesn’t mean that “fiction is over”. Media come and media go, as Chairman Bruce has noted:

Media do not live and die for mediated reasons. Media die because they are built on simpler technical substrates, and those substrates collapse.

In summary: the “magic lantern” dies because the lantern dies, not because the magic dies.

BUT, let’s not forget our McLuhan! The MMP was its own message: a message of mass literacy, portable escape, and—for better and for worse—the massification of genre fiction tropes from marginal pulp to mainstream culture. (This transition is often attributed to cinema, and there’s no denying the importance of skiffy blockbusters in that mainstreaming process, but I think that the role of MMPs is overlooked.)

But note my use of the term tropes: the surface cliches of genre—the dragons and starships and hobbits and hackers—have certainly been admitted to the pantheon of acceptable archetypes. But I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that the underlying affect of genre fiction from the peak of the MMP era has declined alongside the format.

By way of example, you no longer get writers doing the sort of thing that J G Ballard was doing with science fiction throughout the MMP’s golden age: the use of marginal pulp forms as a vehicle for radical experimentation and social critique. My suspicion is that such stories required the sort of literacy that was the message of the MMP as medium: repeat consumption of affordable long-form written fiction; the combination of generic megatext and reading protocols. Ballard needed the cliches of the genre to push against, but he also needed a medium cheap enough to allow him to take risks in doing so.

Now, I don’t think that such experimental writing has entirely gone away; on the contrary, I think it evaporated, and then reacted with the basic elements of different marginal genre, namely “literary” fiction, whose marginality is perhaps more sustainable (for a while) due to its lingering associations with cultural sophistication.

But nor do I think that the successful representational revolution in genre fiction counts as a new wave of social-critical writing, for the simple reason that social-critical fiction is by definition incompatible with comfort, and that comfort is currently the dominant affect in genre publishing.

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The ebook is arguably the replacement for the MMP, and among the messages of the ebook as medium, I would argue, is that long-form prose fiction now belongs to the world of screens: its former ontological distance from TV and cinema (and, more recently, the web) has collapsed. This seems like it might be a good starting point for thinking about changes in genre fiction at the levels of content and form simultaneously.

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1. Talking of shifts in media experiences, I remember when MeFi was among the few websites where the the rubric “don’t read the comments” didn’t yet apply. O halcyon days, etc etc. ↩︎