We are constantly flooded with stimuli — so much so that we often fail to notice when seemingly unrelated developments share a common logic. Consider two recent pieces in The New York Times. In one, Oren Cass criticizes what he calls “financialization”: an economy increasingly devoted not to producing goods but to extracting value through layers of financial manipulation (see here). In another, Elizabeth Harris laments the quiet disappearance of the cheap mass-market paperback (here).

At first glance, these topics appear to inhabit different worlds. Yet they may be symptoms of the same underlying shift: When institutions prioritize margin over mission, accessibility tends to suffer.

This essay concerns the second development, though the first helps illuminate it. The decline of the pocket paperback is not merely a publishing curiosity. It raises a larger question: What kind of reading culture are we prepared to sustain?

Those of us old enough can remember when “reading” meant taking a thing made of paper into one’s hands, opening it, and turning pages in what was called a “book.” Those who recall that artifact probably also remember the cheap mass paperback you could get for $1.99 or so on a paperback rack. (In my boyhood, many were less than a buck.)

Yes, they were cheap in price. They were also cheap in production. There’s a reason they were called “pulp” fiction, owing to the quality of the paper and binding. Bend the spine enough and the glue would crack. Eventually, pages might fall out. The mass market paperback did not age well in terms of sturdiness or yellowing. And the books were often cheap in content quality: romance novels, penny Westerns, thrillers, and so on.

But not always.

As Harris notes, mass markets emerged because an English editor in the 1930s, frustrated at the selection of reading materials he could buy at small stations along British Railways, resolved to heighten the quality while keeping the product affordable for an average traveler. The model caught on and Penguin was the first to corner that market niche in the United States. Their list included substantial works of literature.

One important example of the latter was the mass market paperback in American schools. Compact enough to stick in a pocket (hence the term “pocket paperbacks”) and cheap enough for schools to buy en masse, they were in some ways staples of school English and literature programs. I’ll confess my indebtedness to Mr. Bruce Kovacs, my high school junior English teacher, who let me raid the department’s storeroom racks for what I wanted to read. It’s where I got exposed to The Canterbury Tales, Wuthering Heights, 1984, The Scarlet Letter, and no small part of Shakespeare and Hemingway. It’s how Mrs. Helene Halata, my French teacher, managed to stick adapted French originals like Molière, Maupassant, and Gide into my hands to try to read.

The Times’ article tries to blame the disappearance of mass market paperbacks on consumers themselves: It claims some key constituencies who have bought mass paperbacks — like women reading romances and young people reading thrillers or crime stories — have shifted to e-books. That’s probably true, especially with young people, whose transition to screens I have often called baneful (here).

But I’m also willing to bet “financialization” plays no insignificant role. You have to sell a lot more mass paperbacks to make the profit you would on one $19.95 or $24.95 paperback (which, in the days I was reading mass paperbacks, would have been the price of a hardback). Harris says consumers may be opting for “deluxe hardcovers with colorfully stained edges on the paper or other embellishments.”

Really? Two comments. First, I believe that as much as I believe someone in a Zoom meeting is sitting in front of an impressive bookshelf (typically it’s the background screen the person picked). Yes, books deserve respect but you don’t read a book — which is its main purpose — for “colorfully stained edges.” Second, if the publisher only publishes the “deluxe hardcover” while not making any cheap paperback available, then does one really have a choice? Don’t tell me that even a momentary trend in publishing justifies the permanent suppression of an affordable alternative.

That is “financialization.” It doesn’t serve the real reason we should be publishing books: to get people to read them. It serves only the publishers’ mercenary considerations, his bottom line — even if it means losing the readership of those able to afford the cheaper, mass market alternative. These are likely the cohort that, as a society, we should want to encourage to keep their noses in books. Should a society that makes books more expensive be surprised there’s a decline in reading? (Note that this phenomenon is not absent in the Catholic publishing submarket. Remember years ago when there was a book and pamphlet rack in the vestibule, where many items could be acquired for coins? Now many require at least a five dollar bill, if not more.)

So, I’ll lament the demise of the mass market paperback, despite its occasional limits in literary quality and product durability, because I think it reflects a deeper issue: It’s another nail in the coffin of a society that is increasingly not reading, at least not reading in the in-depth way “reading” once was understood to mean. Because, in our tidal wave of information overload, we forfeit something even more important: depth and understanding. If this is modern “reading,” then perhaps we also need to update the meaning of another concept: illiteracy.