Jesus, people are paying that much for books? Even buying them new, I often pick up a paperback from a high street shop in the UK for about £8? Maybe £12 sometimes? And that's not including the used bookshop I go to sometimes that will have books for £2-3. Sure, they're not hardbacks, or large reference textbooks, but to get a story to read is pretty affordable
Books are not too expensive
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Re: Books are not too expensive
#72This seems really quite confused in its message. > Yes, the original price of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolkien’s Fellowship were just $3.95 and $5. But those are nominal values. When we factor inflation, the picture changes dramatically. In today’s dollars—and you can run this exercise yourself—those cover prices would look more like $43 and $54. I mean, yeah that's too expensive... > Now compare that to housing, he…
I wouldn’t say they’re wild and I have a big book buying habit.
A new hardback is typically in the £20-30 range, a new paperback somewhere around £10. These are bookshop prices, not Amazon prices.
As a fairly avid reader, I try to get through a book a week, so £520 a year for a hobby. Sure it’s more than a netflix sub, but books really are quite cheap, particularly once you look at cheaper retailers and second hand.
Granted if you’re collecting lettered editions from fine press publishers, that’s perhaps a different problem.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#73When I was a child my parents told me they would always buy me a book no matter what. They would take me to bookstores of all stripes and let me wander. I would spend hours walking the sections looking at whatever caught my eye. Then I would pick out a couple to take home and read. This was how I discovered the world. I think this had a bigger impact on my education then anything else in my childhood and I owe all bo…
Keep your eyes open for library book sales. My town library has one every year--I have slowly made some space on my shelves at home through donations--and I assume many of the surrounding towns do as well.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you're primarily paying for the copyright. The cost of a book is fairly trivial
Not with paper prices where they are these days.
I haven't done the research recently, but I assume that the cost of printing and distributing physical books is still less than a lot of people assume it is.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#75The bigger problem for me is buying Ebooks without DRM, which are cheaper than the paperback. I see no reason why I should be paying the same (or often more) than the paperback version. Just let me buy the ebook and let me own it. Right now, after pirating it, I have to find the author's patreon / something and contribute some money that way. It shouldn't be this hard to give someone money.
>Right now, after pirating it, I have to find the author's patreon / something and contribute some money that way. It shouldn't be this hard to give someone money Why not just buy the thing you are pirating? That would seem to be the easiest way to give someone money.
The thinking is the sold product is the inferior product than the pirated version and so rather than reward the people making it worse (Amazon, mostly), trying to reward the person who made something you want in the first place
Re: Books are not too expensive
#76To be fair, this article is partially true. Now, allow me to pour some gasoline/petrol/benzine around this thread. Have you purchased a college course required book recently? There is a market monopoly by Pearson, Wiley,Cengage, and McGraw. Buy the eBook, or the actual book with a CD in the back, but cannot access the pictures because the code can be use only once ! (often the codes do not work at all) Updated every…
I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book (it was an ebook so it couldn’t be resold, and also super expensive, and the class homework was all linked to from the book itself). The class was also somewhat useless, which lead to a lot of students surmising that the professor’s deal was basically just = free A / course requirement lol
> I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book
This is a return to the original model of a university, where professors made their money from the course fees students paid to take their courses.
It's an improvement over what we have now.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#77This whole article is begging the question. Books aren't expensive because they could cost more. If they thought people would pay more, books would cost more. There could be many reasons books didn't keep up with inflation - their production might be cheaper due to efficiency or cheaper raw materials, maybe they were already too expensive, or maybe inflation is skewed towards certain areas - imagine using the same argument to say RAM isn't too expensive actually because of the price of it in 1980.
It's interesting that he didn't breakdown the cost per book to the publishers. I think before ebooks came out he probably would have done, but ebooks have made it clear that books are priced at essentially the price they think they can get away with.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#78The pricing framing in the article confuses cost-to-produce with willingness-to-pay. Two completely separate things.
A book costs $4 to print and $25 at retail not because of margin gouging, but because the price reflects value-to-reader times conversion-elasticity, not the printing line item.
Same thing happens in services. Agencies that cost-plus their pricing leave 30-50% on the table because they're solving for cost recovery instead of value transferred. The signal is always "what does this make possible for the buyer," never "what did this take us to make."
Re: Books are not too expensive
#79Many of the comments talks about the price of books like those required for college courses, and the article don't really make a big deal of this, but the statistic it uses does specifically say "recreational books".
If your first language is English I assume that this is less of an issue, but the problem is that not enough books are being translated anymore. Translation is expensive, and no, AI cannot do this very well yet. So yes, books are pretty cheap, their are also all either shitty cookbooks, biographies or crime novels. If you want to learn something new, you better learn to read English at a fairly high level.
My take is that yes, books are fairly cheap, but part of that is because the cost is kept down by limiting the selection to exclude a large variety of books that are no longer economical to publish. Leaving us with only the mass market books that can be printed in volumes and sold in supermarkets.
Go buy used books, they are frequently only a few Euros because no one wants them. There's a insane back catalogue of well written books in your language to be found used, and the printing quality is often very good, and if not you paid maybe €2.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#80I moved entirely to buying hardcovers. It is easier on the eye, and paperbacks, especially in India, are horribly bad quality. The cost is a matter of perspective (or geography). A typical hardcover costs ~₹2,000 (~$20) which is the norm, but that is a costly thing in India (is roughly the cost of the tea/milk supply for the whole month for my family.) Of course, this makes me choose my books wisely and with intentio…
I guess the hardcovers are better because they are not printed in India. From what I've seen with nonfiction books, the ones printed in India are only softcovers—pathetic paper/build quality, and poor readability because they're smaller than their US counterpart (usually 19.8 cm long in India compared to 23.5 cm in the US), and the US layout is shrunk to fit the Indian size. So, any hardcover is imported from the US and thus of better quality.