The latest Library Lovers book, Booking for Trouble, came out in hardback in the US on Tuesday, This is the sixteenth in Jenn McKinlay’s series about Lindsay Norris, a library director in Briar Creek, Connecticut, and sees Lindsay getting involved in a murder after heading out on a book boat to some of the islands in her library’s patch, inspired by bookmobiles (or mobile libraries as we have here I guess?) that she’s seen in other areas.
But this also is my chance to talk about the demise of the mass market paperback in the US. These aren’t available on Kindle in the UK, so I’ve been buying in the paperbacks for years from the US. There are a couple of series like this, where I rely on these smaller than average (and cheaper than average!) paperback copies to get my fix. But sales have been dropping, and more and more books have switched to the larger and more expensive trade paperback format. Various people have been writing about it, but here’s the New York Time’s article from the start of the month, and Publisher’s Weekly’s from December. As a voracious and speedy reader, the price point and convenience of mass markets – especially secondhand – has been a boon for my reading – particularly in my early days of romance reading when the likes of Eloisa James and Sarah MacLean weren’t always getting UK releases. There are series that I want to finish – or continue reading – where I definitely can’t justify the hardback price for them. And given my love of matching sets, a size change is definitely not what I want either! This is one of a number of series where I’m going to have decisions to make as the next books come out.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 