The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market paperback revolution.
The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in English and deserving of some extra credit because the company he started continues in the same business to the present day.) Pocket Books in the US was also born just before the war. During World War II, historian and polymath Philip Van Doren Stern (who wrote, among other things, the New Yorker short story on which the movie classic “It’s A Wonderful Life” was based) ran a program for the US military by which inexpensive paperbacks were made available to the troops.
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