In a world where bigger often means better, newspapers instead are taking a page from the electronics industry, pursuing a quest for smallness and convenience in an effort to retain an increasingly scarce commodity: readers.

　　From Chile to Britain and Finland to Malaysia, newspapers that once published in the traditional broadsheet size are switching to the smaller tabloid, or compact, layout. The trend is blurring a distinction between traditionally staid and serious broadsheets and racier tabloids and could fuel an acceleration in the number of newspapers making the switch, experts say.

　　Whether this turns out to be anything more than a short-term fix - attracting enough new readers and advertisers to improve the industry's fortunes - remains unclear.

　　With sales falling in most developed economies as readers turn to the Internet and other sources for news, newspaper publishers seem eager to embrace any strategy that will shore up circulation. Studies show that readers like tabloids because they are easier to handle than broadsheets, particularly on a windy park bench or a crowded train.

　　"People want things in more convenient packages - whether it's motorcars or iPods or newspapers," said Neil Hurman, managing director at Manning Gottlieb OMD, a London-based firm that buys advertising space in newspapers and other media. "The newspapers are just going along with that."

　　The Wall Street Journal became the latest newspaper to announce a physical downsizing, saying last week that it planned to start printing its European and Asian editions as tabloids in October, while keeping its main U.S. edition as a broadsheet.

　　Last month, the New Straits Times, an English-language newspaper in Malaysia, went entirely tabloid, after introducing such a paper as a test alongside its main edition in September. A cluster of newspapers in Scandinavia are making the change this year, following similar moves last year by competitors. Newspapers in Switzerland, France and Bulgaria are shrinking their page sizes, too.

　　Jim Chisholm, a consultant and strategy adviser to the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, estimates that by the end of this year, more than 40 percent of newspapers worldwide will be tabloids, up from around one-third in 1999.

　　The recent wave of conversions was prompted in part by the high-profile decision by The Independent, a British broadsheet whose circulation had fallen to nearly 200,000 from more than 400,000 in 1990, to introduce a tabloid in 2003. The move was soon followed by The Times of London.

　　"Everybody's been getting very excited since the Independent's move," Chisholm said, "but in fact this is something that has been going on for decades."