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Books are not too expensive

millersbookreview.com

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Re: Books are not too expensive

#141

Post by darth_avocado »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #128
palmotea wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. Responding to the dead child comment: that's what common paperbacks are for. Don't don't mess up a nice hardcover or anything rare.

Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

Growing up, I couldn’t afford new books for school all the time. Ended up thrifting a lot of them. Annotations were like a mixed bag of candy. Sometimes they were your favorite flavor and sometimes they would give you brain aneurysms. Unfortunately that experience makes me treat books as precious objects.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#142

Post by palmotea »

ericol wrote: post #138

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 on…

> It's space you can't use for anything else, dedicated entirely to objects most people open once or twice and never touch again.

It worth noting that books can be decor. To the point where people who don't read buy them for decoration.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#143

Post by panzagl »

The real problem is books are too cheap- as in cheaply made perfect bound pieces of shit with a bit of cardboard glued on that don't open correctly filled with nasty lightweight textureless bleached paper covered with mis-registered text and blobs of ink from under-maintained presses. We're being charged a premium for a demonstrably inferior product.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#144

Post by dhosek »

randusername wrote: post #84

It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. But for the price conscious general reader just inter-library loan. If you want to buy To Kill A Mockingbird or The Hobbit be my guest, but any library in the US would have a few copies of those. Public libraries are awesome. Use it or lose it.

I’ve been looking at a potential move to another country (which is momentarily looking like it will happen this year). Because I prioritize things badly, I went through my list of books to check out from the library and searched the catalogs of the two English-language libraries at my destination city. The list has 1,190 books. 175 are on the shelves of my local suburban library and all but 69 are available through the suburban library system (those 69 are available from the Chicago Public Library though). In the destination city, one library has 289 titles and the other 71.¹ The local public library will be the thing I miss the most if I move.

⸻

1. I omitted audio books and translations to the local language² from the counts.

2. I speak the language decently and can read it fluently, but my general policy is not to read a book in translation if I can read the original language. This does mean that some of the books in translation, if the native system in the other country has them translated to the local language (they have a much less robust public library system in general and I’ve not seen any indication of any significant numbers of English-language books) I can get those there.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#145

Post by hx8 »

everdrive wrote: post #85

Books are not too expensive, but many books are too long. I don't mean that it's bad for books to be long, but a lot of books have about 50-60 pages worth of real content, and editors and publishers demand that fluff is added because people don't want to pay ~$20 for a 50 page book. But by adding the fluff they did not actually increase the value per dollar, but instead wasted a small amount of their time.

This is very true in non-fiction, where you can clearly see authors take an idea that should be a long blog post and stretch it out to 150 pages.

The same authors usually have blog posts that should have been tweets.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#146

Post by panzagl »

chromacity wrote: post #11

Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later. Sure, it's a classic, but it's hardly a "must-have". At best, it's something you need to read for school, although many school districts have dropped it from their lists. Having said that, I think the complaints about book prices ar…

The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#147

Post by syntacticsalt »

ninalanyon wrote: post #101
ivansavz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this! I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (…

It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.

I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.

More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#148

Post by sporadicism »

One of the reasons that books are indeed too expensive is that the mass market paperback is effectively dead. Now consumers much choose from fewer, higher priced options. That is, trade paperbacks and hardcovers.

Hardcovers may be relatively inexpensive by this metric or that but I don't want to pay for them and I don't really want them at all.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#149

Post by ineedasername »

A poor analysis that excludes any talk of the production costs of different aspects of getting a book to market.

Printing + labor in editing etc was 30% to 40% of sticker price in 1960. Today it's 10 to 15 or lower while author royties are about the same. Retail channels like Amazon demand a higher cut but not enough to cover that gap.

The net margin % of sticker paid by consumers above cost of production in all print and labor is paid by consumers, with the result that in raw dollars consumer still pay ~50% more than can be accounted for by inflation alone.

Consider: as a portion of average income, a very large # of everyday factory produced items are substantially less expensive, some even in non-inflation adjusted terms! A TV? A fraction of the cost. Plenty more examples. Books are expensive.

Re: Books are not too expensive

#150

Post by mrwh »

Miraltar wrote: post #113
mrwh wrote: post #109

Tangential, and very anecdotal, but I've been seeing more books on the BART. While almost everyone is hunched over their phones of course, it feels like there's a growing number reading a paperback. (Oddly? it's been a while since I saw a kindle.)

Bay Area Rapid Transit?

That's right. In today's carriage to San Francisco my very unscientific observation it's: three reading books, thirty on their phones, ten resting with their thoughts.
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