Paperback
A paperback (softcover, softback) book is one with a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples.
In contrast, hardback (hardcover) books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth, leather, paper, or plastic.
Lower-quality paper, glued (rather than stapled or sewn) bindings, and the lack of a hard cover may contribute to the lower cost of paperbacks.
[6] The Routledge's Railway Library series of paperbacks remained in print until 1898, and offered the traveling public 1,277 unique titles.
[7] The Continental market also supported examples of cheap paper-bound books: Bernhard Tauchnitz started the Collection of British and American Authors in 1841.
[8] These inexpensive, paperbound editions, a direct precursor to mass-market paperbacks, eventually ran to over 5,000 volumes.
Reclam published Shakespeare in this format from October 1857[9] and went on to pioneer the mass market paperbound Universal-Bibliothek series[10] from 10 November 1867.
The German publisher Albatross Books revised the 20th-century mass-market paperback format in 1931, but the approach of World War II cut the experiment short.
He purchased paperback rights from publishers, ordered large print runs (such as 20,000 copies—large for the time) to keep unit prices low, and looked to non-traditional book-selling retail locations.
[citation needed] In the United States, Robert de Graaf created the Pocket Books label in 1939, partnering with Simon & Schuster to issue a similar line of reprints.
His practices contrasted with those of Lane by his adoption of illustrated covers aimed at the North American market.
Because of its number-one position in what became a very long list of pocket editions, James Hilton's Lost Horizon is often cited as the first American paperback book.
"[17] In 1953, Time magazine summarized its books as "westerns, whodunits, and the kind of boy-meets-girl story that can be illustrated by a ripe cheesecake jacket [cover]".
World War II brought both new technology and a wide readership of men and women serving in the military or employed as shift workers; paperbacks were cheap, readily available, and easily posted and carried.
A revolving metal rack (invented in 1906), designed to display a wide variety of paperbacks in a small space, found its way into drugstores, dimestores, and markets.
During World War II, the U.S. military distributed some 122 million "Armed Services Editions" [21] paperback novels to the troops.
Retail store owners no longer had to devote feet of valuable counter space to low-profit paperbacks.
[23] In 1945, Bantam Books was formed by Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and husband and wife Ian and Betty Ballantine as a mass-market paperback publisher.
Canadian mass-market paperback initiatives in the 1940s included White Circle Books, a subsidiary of Collins (UK.
Fawcett, an independent newsstand distributor, in 1945, negotiated a contract with New American Library to distribute its Mentor and Signet titles.
"[26] Sales soared, prompting Gold Medal editorial director Ralph Daigh to comment later, "In the past six months we have produced 9,020,645 books, and people seem to like them very well."
The leading paperback publishers often hired experienced pulp magazine cover artists, including Rudolph Belarski and Earle K. Bergey, who helped create the look and feel of paperbacks and set an appealing visual standard that continues to this day.
Scores of well-known authors were published in paperback, including Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck.
[30] They are commonly released after the hardback edition and often sold not only at bookstores, but also where books are not the main business, such as at airports, drugstores, and supermarkets.
Mass-market paperbacks also have offered collections of comic strips and magazine cartoon series, such as Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy and Chon Day's Brother Sebastian.
Unlike mass-market paperbacks they are distributed by their original hard-cover publishers directly to book stores, not through magazine distributors to other retailers.
Japanese manga, when they are collected into volumes, are published in the tankōbon format, approximately the size of a trade-sized book.
