Aug
14th
2019
The Price We Pay – Are Book Prices too Much? · 9:40pm Aug 14th, 2019
Honestly, I was going to hold off on a second post this week until Thursday (I’m blitzing through edits on Jungle right now) but this post had already been on my mind, and then a discussion yesterday online regarding MacMillan’s continued crusade against libraries basically poured gasoline over the spark and, well … Here we are.
Look, something that I see brought up constantly online, including in the very post that kicked this whole chain of thoughts off, is the price of books. It’s a hot topic anywhere. There are a lot of people who see them as too expensive, to overpriced, whether digital or not.
And you know what? I think they’re wrong.
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Viking ZX · 304 views
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#Books
#Controversial
#Digital Bricks
#Ebooks
#Inflation
#Math
#Prices
#Pricing
#Publishing
I wish I could fav this article, this is something everyone should read.
You even covered the whole wage stagnation problem.
5106081
You can always share it on Facebook, twitter, Reddit, whatever ... More eyes!
Thanks!
5106085
*Looks at jar on desk*
Got enough, thank you.
I wonder about the future of physical books.
Used to remember when there were bookstores everywhere like the salt creatures and buffalo but now there's not that many.
My borough doesn't have a major bookstore have to go elsewhere.
When ebooks are > or = to hardcover prices, yes, yes they are.
Another thing I am quite curious about is if or more likely when we'll reach a tipping point of ebook vs physical sales and second-hand book shops will go extinct.
i.imgur.com/5tNAqta.jpg
(Much longer version)
The relative cost of books arguably should have gone down (as your ebooks have, but even more sharply, being most comparable to software). To the extent which they haven't, it's due to the big publishers dragging the cost upwards. The examples in the chart above which went up did so (arguably) due to regulation, bad incentives and collusion between providers. Everything sold as an unregulated product with market competition went down, with sharper drops as the physical components take up less of the production cost. The pricing found with indies on Amazon etc. is arguably the "correct" price.
Devil's advocate: piracy is to ebooks as second-hand stores and friends sharing their copies are to paper books. You wait a little bit, get a slightly inferior instance of the product for little to no money, and the author receives no compensation.
Re: Canadian prices (from the blog comments), yes even Canadian-published books have the ridiculous markups. All the big publishers have Canadian branches, but ~$50 per hardcover is normal for big-name authors, with mid-$30s for others.
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I would counter that books shouldn't fall nearly as fall as software. Software has dropped because it's a "boom" industry with a lot of it advancing and being discovered. The cost or writing books has gone down due to new tech, but it's still substantial. I wouldn't say it's dropped nearly as far as software has. Honestly I'd say it's closer to a household furnishing.
That said, there are definitely issues with collusion and publishers playing greedy shifting it up. They've even straight up admitted to this.
And what is up with Canadian publishers? Are they like Canadian ISPs?
Reminds me of the Extra Credits series on triple A game pricing (and how keeping the box cost locked at $60 has led to tge current extreme monetization regime).
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Yep, with the added bonus of being leeches who survive off of government funding for Canadian Cultural Content. I'd have to dig up the article from a few years back, but most of the books which receive Canadian literary prizes (funded by the government) go to books which are only ever purchased by/for reviewers, libraries, and collectors at utterly insane prices. The publishers get tax breaks and grants when they give contracts for these books out, so it's subsidies/graft all the way down.
Sounds like you're talking about books to consume as a media. Thought you were going to go into Education Textbooks that really have no right to charge an arm and a leg for every single bloody version, esp. since they have a death grip on profiting in the education industry.
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Textbooks are an entirely different, insane, kettle of fish.
Completely insane. MLP straight up did an episode on it with Flim and Flam, and that's just nuts.
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I saw something elsewhere online about textbook prices the other day, mentioning how US prices in particular are insanely high, while copies sold internationally are cheaper (well, relatively so) but explicitly not available in the USA.
I commented that I had been rather confused when I bought a physics textbook at my university bookshop here in Australia - it had a "Not for sale in the USA" label printed onto the cover, but still used American spelling. You would not believe how distracting it can be to continually see the word "color" when you're expecting it to be "colour."