While Pocket Books was the first to create books of the paperback type on a large scale, other publishing companies were soon to follow in their steps, and these included Avon, Bantam, Dell, Ace and plenty other companies. In the beginning, paperbacks were used only to reprint books, but when in 1950 a company called Gold Medal Books launched original titles in this format, other large companies reacted and did the same.
The sale of paperback originals worked very well and in just half a year, Gold Medal Books sold over 9 million books of this type. Naturally, publishers of hardcover books weren’t happy and even claimed that this type of paperback original can easily undermine the publishing structure.
Soon enough, genre categories started to appear and you could usually find them as mass market paperbacks, a type of book that had a considerable impact on pulp and slick magazines. The cheap magazines market diminished considerably when people started to buy cheaper books. One of the reasons behind this shift was also the fact that authors began to write for books, when they wrote for magazines before. Artists which previously did covers for pulp magazines were now hired to create artwork for paperback books. One other factor was the fact that one could find well known authors which were published in books of paperback format, and this included John Steinbeck or Arthur Miller.
With World War II, new technologies appeared and more people started reading, partially because there were travel restrictions and partially because the economy taking a hit, less money were available for more expensive books. While lamination and printing in four colors were initially designed for maps of the military, they were soon used in paperback covers, which caught the eye of the reader when they saw it in grocery stores or on metal stands in the newspaper sections.