"Dog-eared, spines broken..."

"This fantasy novel [A Spell for Chameleon] by Piers Anthony looked like a book for grown-ups: It was a mass-market paperback. Even if you don’t know the terminology, you know what a mass-market paperback is. It’s a pocket book, a pulp novel, a spinner-rack book. It’s the cheapest, smallest paperback format—the book designed for impulse purchase in the airport or drugstore. As a child, I read plenty of larger-format, or trade paperbacks—most of the middle-grade or young-adult novels I bought from Waldenbooks with my allowance money were printed at that size. And everything I took out from the library was a hardcover.
     But when I saw adults reading books—at Bradford Beach on Lake Michigan, on the No. 15 bus we rode to my dad’s office downtown—they were mass-markets. Dog-eared, spines broken, they fit in a purse or a pocket, and fit into the busy lives and schedules of the grown-ups in my world. (In their portability and impulse-buy cheapness, they were the e-books of their day.)"
— Dan Kois, Slate
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Sometimes soft is better than hard...

"Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD. [...]
     'It’s definitely making the consumer happy to have the paperback available sooner,' said Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, an independent store. 'If there’s one form of printed book that will survive, if there was only one, it would be the trade paperback.' ”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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"Speaking of Pulp Noir stories, Stephen King wrote a book [...] called The Colorado Kid for Hard Case Crime, a book publisher who embraces the 1950s style pulp crime novel genre. Check out the awesome 1950s cover. Here's a great quote from the press release:
     ' "This is an exciting line of books," Stephen King commented, "and I'm delighted to be a part of it. Hard Case Crime presents good, clean, bare-knuckled storytelling, and even though The Colorado Kid is probably more bleu than outright noir, I think it has some of those old-fashioned kick-ass story-telling virtues. It ought to; this is where I started out, and I'm pleased to be back." '
Unfortunately, while the cheap trashy $5 paperback format fits the style, I always prefer hardback books with clean thick acid free paper. The presentation of a book is a big factor in my enjoyment of the book. [...]'
— Mike Shea
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