People said that e-books would kill the printed book when they first hit the scene, but that obviously hasn’t happened, but not so long ago I read some articles saying that e-books were killing mass market paperback sales, which got me remembering that in the late 2010s quite a few of mass market paperback editions of Stephen King books (the ones published by Pocket Books) went out of print both in bookstores and in Amazon, and recently have been back in print with little blurbs saying that they’re anniversary editions (for example: Christine in 2023 saying 40th anniversary editions), which were obviously marketing stunts to get people to buy them (the only new thing to them were the “anniversary” blurb and literally nothing else).
So, do you think that it’s true that mass market paperbacks got hit the hardest by e-books compared to tarde paperbacks and hardcovers?
by RobertoSerrano2003
1 Comment
From what I recall reading at the time ebook reader started coming out, the people who were buying ebooks were affluent women who typically purchased hardbacks. That’s because it cost a few hundred dollars for the reader or tablet, and then the digital books weren’t that much cheaper than paperbacks.
Roughly two out of three 18 to 29 year olds prefer print books to digital. Print books still outsell digital books 4:1 overall.