Books are not too expensive

I grew up with books too. I fondly remember Time-Life books which were all illustrated about science and stuff. And I remember randomly flipping through World Book.

Todays kids though have the internet, and youtube, and LLMs (oh-oh). They have access to orders of magnitude more info about orders of magnitude more topics than I ever had.

Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar. But the article applies it across industries, where those assumptions break down. This makes no sense.

The article called it a 'standard profit metric'. It is a metric, but it doesn't measure profit (as it ignores capitalized costs) and it isn't standard.

One thing not mentioned in this article, and which doesn't seem to be discussed much these days is how the tax law changed to essentially eliminate the backlist (which was unsold copies of a book from the initial print run stored in a warehouse).

Time was, an initial print run would be quite large, and books would then be stored and taxes deferred until they were actually sold --- when the law changed, requiring that taxes be paid on unsold inventory each year, these warehouses became a tax liability and the remaindered book market was vastly inflated (previously, it was only those books which had been returned to a publisher and which were not suited to be sold as new) --- one slim text from a religion class I took in college was marked up with a series of price increases as each previous year's taxes were added to the price of the book each year for the inventory which went unsold, finally arriving at $76 from an initial price of $35 or some such from the previous time that course had been taught.

Probably, much of the damage/pricing pressure of this was taken away by the savings of digital book production --- consider that previously, to publish a book a publisher would:

- typeset a hot metal copy using a Monotype or Linotype composition machine to create galleys

- cut those up and do paste-up to create a pagination

- photograph the pasteups to create a negative which was then used to make a printing plate

Usually, the negatives would be stored and re-used for a reprint (or modified to make corrections), hence books of this period noting that they had been "Typeset and printed from new film").

The freedom of digital imposition has also made the huge expansion of book subjects and treatments possible --- math used to be termed "penalty copy" and required specially-trained compositors who would typeset what could be set on hot-metal machine, then source the balance of the characters required from a drawer in a case, if need be, modifying spacing material w/ a saw, then pull a proof to make a negative as before.

Books _are_ expensive. This article only looks at the monetary side of it.

The cost goes beyond the price tag. Books take up space, and that space compounds as you keep acquiring them. It's space you can't use for anything else, dedicated entirely to objects most people open once or twice and never touch again. And that cost doesn't stay abstract: at some point you're buying more bookshelves, upgrading to a larger one, or worst of all, dragging everything through a move. That last one hits harder the less stable your living situation is, and less stable living situations track pretty closely with lower salaries.

I'm talking about physical books specifically, since that's what the article seems to cover. Ebooks are a different matter.

Sure, _a book_ might be sustainable in this system but the average book likely is just shipped around a ton and never used in this system.