One of the annoyances of buying books when living abroad is that you may only find the export edition, which is a mass market paperback. If you’re familiar with buying literary fiction in the U.S. as larger-sized trade paperback, then it’s a rather odd sight to see novels by Ondaatje or Pamuk sold in mass market paperback edition. Another term I’ve recently seen for these books: open market editions.

I assume publishers do this small-sized edition out of some slightly lower cost in shipping to far flung places of the world like Argentina? I can think of absolutely no other reason for doing so.

I’ll resort to buying a book in this export edition if it’s my only option. Fortunately, I don’t come across those export editions too often.

But this is another category where having a Kindle or some other e-book reading device might help. A particular problem from a readability perspective with these export editions is that the page layout is not modified for the smaller form factor. The text is simply shrunk down to a smaller size. Somewhere the whole relationship between typography and readability went out the window with these editions.