The medium is the message, as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan said.
The importance of the medium is something we鈥檝e all thought about, whether we know it or not. Whether to get news from TV, newspapers, or online. The switch from VHS tapes to DVDs to DVRs to streaming.
Lately, I鈥檝e been thinking about the decline of the mass-market paperback book.
There are a couple of kinds of paperbacks, but the mass-market paperback was, for more than half a century, the default size. Usually under seven inches tall and less than five inches wide.
They ranged from slim little volumes, all the way up to quite chunky 500-page-plus tomes, suitable for epic fantasy novels and airport thrillers. Even the bigger ones could fit, with some shoving, into most coat pockets.
These books are still printed, but they鈥檙e being seen more and more rarely, and I fear that outside of used bookstores, their days are numbered.
Before their heyday, the humble paperback was simply cheap. Introduced in its modern form in the middle of the Great Depression, it provided an inexpensive way for people to get a whole book.
The message of the paperback was varied.
It could be a key to learning and culture. You could pick up a set of Shakespeare plays and classic novels, books of philosophy and political science.
Or it could be disreputable, cheap in both form and content. Early paperbacks competed with the pulps and mens magazines.
This flexibility was because of the medium 鈥� mass-market paperbacks were cheap to print and therefore, publishers could take a flyer and see what sold. Buyers weren鈥檛 risking much money, either. If they didn鈥檛 like it, they could toss it away.
Paperbacks drew a lot of their power from that disposability. They weren鈥檛 considered important.
This meant that a lot of less-respectable genres, like science fiction and fantasy, spy thrillers, romance novels, and mysteries, pumped out far more paperbacks than hardcovers. Whole careers were built on the back of the paperback.
Ebooks are in many ways the natural successors to the paperback. They take up even less space than a paperback, just a bit of memory on a phone, tablet, or e-reader.
But every transition from one format to another means a loss of something. A paperback has a very different life than an ebook 鈥� thumbed through, sun-faded, dog-eared, it shows its age.
Most importantly, paperbacks were always on the move.
They could be loaned or given away, lost and found on public transit. They could make their way through yard sales and used bookstores.
Paperbacks were a democratic format, if only because each one could be read by so many people.
