Pocketbooks

Mass market paperback

The mass market paperback is the cheapest version of a paperback that you can find and in most cases it’s small, cheap and it doesn’t have any illustrations inside. These books are usually launched after the main edition with hardcovers has been around for a while and they’re usually sold in places that are a bit less traditional, like drug stores, airports, supermarkets, though obviously you can also find them in regular bookstores. Plenty of titles, especially fiction ones, are in their first edition and didn’t get a hardcover version. New authors and their first novels usually come out with this type of book.

The business practices used for this type of paperback is different then those done with other books. When a hardback is not sold after sitting in the store for a long period of time, it will usually be returned to the publisher, and a refund is requested. With a mass market paperback, they usually strip the cover of the book and they simply pulp it after that. The paperbacks which are sold in the newsstands of airports are usually known as airport novels, as people use them to have something to do while waiting around.

Trade paperback

The trade paperback is a book that has a softcover, but is usually bigger than a mass market paperback. At the same time, this type of book is usually of better quality than a mass market, sometimes equaling that of a hardcover as far as pages are concerned. In some cases, the only difference between a trade paperback and a hardcover is the type of cover they get.

The price of a trade paperback is usually somewhere between that of a mass market paperback and that of a hardcover book. The copies which are sent by the publisher in advance, for purposes of promotion, usually come as trade paperbacks.