It seems every week a new piece about the decline of the American reading habit goes viral. The idea that we are entering a literary apocalypse that threatens our democracy may be overstated, but the book-reading trend is undeniably 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.
These pieces unfailingly focus on external issues: disruptive technologies, political dysfunction and a decrepit educational system. But what about the supply side? Could corporatized publishing, with its consolidations and centralization, have degraded the product enough to abet the decline in consumer demand? Consider the death of the mass-market paperback last year. When the Big Five publishing houses (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster) ended the most affordable book format in America in 2025, it had long since failed to live up to the "mass" part of its name.
The format's rise was a story of commercial opportunism. Until the 1940s, book retail was dominated by hardcovers. Penguin in the UK and Pocket Books in the United States pioneered a softcover, glue-bound alternative that was cheaper to manufacture, easier to carry and far more affordable. If you make a dime on each of one hundred thousand paperbacks, that beats a dollar on 2,500 hardcovers, the average unit sale at the time. The books were also sold in drugstores, grocery stores and gas stations across middle America, not just in metropolitan bookshops.
That reach mattered. In the 1930s there were only about five hundred dedicated bookshops across America, yet basic literacy was nearly universal. Pocket Books launched in 1939 and sold 8.5 million copies within two years, a remarkable result for a format not yet sold north of Boston, west of Chicago or south of Washington, DC.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing