Letter from a Reader 5.16.26
Are the books of 'Olive Kitteridge' author Elizabeth Strout getting 'schmaltzy'? And why fewer books go to paperback, the 'erection' test that landed 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' in court, and more
When was the last time you flinched at the price of a hardcover book and decided to wait for the cheaper paperback? I stopped doing it after buying an iPad, where I do a lot of my reading on a Kindle app. If you still wait for a paperback, your days of being able to do that may be numbered.
Paperback editions used to come out a year or so after the hardcover. These reissues did more than offer readers relief from sticker shock. They gave writers a second chance to boost their sales with the help of a splashier cover or fresh approach to marketing.
But you can no longer count on seeing a paperback edition of a book, the Wall Street Journal reported early last year. These days, publishers often skip it, focusing their attention on hardcover or other editions.
“The shift reflects changing reader habits, the popularity of audiobooks and ebooks, and the power a few major retailers hold over the publishing industry,” Jeffrey Tractenberg wrote in the WSJ. He added:
“Publishers, authors, agents and retailers all earn more on hardcover titles than they do with paperbacks. The typical hardcover’s retail list price is about twice that of the paperback list price. And authors usually get royalties of about 15% of the hardcover price, but only about half that share on paperbacks.”
A second blow to paperback fans came later in the year when ReaderLink, the largest U.S. distributor of mass-market paperbacks, stopped distributing them to big box and other stores. But that double whammy doesn’t mean that worthy paperbacks have vanished. Or so I realized when I saw one of my favorite 2025 memoirs, Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare (Vintage, 2026), listed recently as “New in Paperback” on book blogs.
The survival of high-quality paperbacks like Dalton’s Women’s Prize finalist and Rick Atkinson’s award-winning The British Are Coming (Holt Paperbacks, 2020) is good news for anyone who will travel this summer to spots where you can’t easily recharge a tablet or phone loaded with ebooks. It’s all the better for those of us on the Gulf Coast who are bracing for the start of hurricane season and power outages on June 1.
Quote of the day: A prosecutor’s ‘erection’ test of porn
“I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection, we prosecute.”
Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the British barrister who led the prosecution of Penguin Books in 1960 after it published Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in explaining the grounds for action, as quoted by Frances Wilson in a recent Spectator review of Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Yale, 2026)
Are Elizabeth Strout’s books getting schmaltzy?
The Yiddish word “schmaltz” refers to rendered chicken or goose fat, and critics often apply it to treacly or sentimental novels like those of Mitch Albom and Nicholas Sparks.