Audio has been the mainstay of the news of late, so of the two stories to round out the week, I'll start with the ear-related one. As the headline of this article in TechCrunch so informatively puts it, Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
To illustrate, literally, the figures, there is a fascinating graphic that shows how the gap narrowed from 2015 when radio accounted for 75 percent of time spent listening to spoken word and podcasts 10 percent through to the present day where the figures are 39 and 40 percent respectively.
There is more to this than a story about the rise of podcasts. Following on from another theme that's been prominent of late, this is also a story about format convergence. Of podcast listeners, 80 percent tune into audio and video podcasts, with only 13 percent listening only to audio.
This really does show that we can't place content into convenient silos and think of this as audio, that as digital text, another as video, and this one over here as print.
The End of Mass Market Paperbacks
Which brings me neatly onto today's other story. It's one I trailed last year. Over the course of this year, the mass market paperback is being phased out in the US. I admit I was confused when I first read that this was happening last year because as a UK-based reader I was used to (lazily) using that term to describe the book I might go and pick up in Waterstones. But that's not what is meant.
Mass market paperbacks are, well, not really seen around much anymore (only twenty-one million units sold across all titles in 2024, hence the phasing out formally) but are the smaller format with cheaper paperstock found on vendors' stalls and the magazine sections of newsstands and shops.
The Guardian has a super piece looking back at the history of the mass market paperback and its cultural significance. It mentions TikTok and the way that the rise of the book as aesthetic has helped seal the cheap and cheerful paperback's coffin.
What it doesn't mention is the inevitable sequel: in a year or two someone will relaunch the format and it will become a social media trend.
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