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 2 to 3 years, minor changes sufficient enough the break the previous versions. e.g., randomized tests, samples and alike.
Captive audience. If Jacky teaches the course, bet your bippy it is Jacky's book you will be buying, no ifs or buts about it.
I can do the same for certification. Have you seen the PMP certification book? Grey paper with gray text republished annually, meaning of words and descriptions are changes and tests are adjusted specifically to confuse on wording. Or, have you tried to by an international standard like ISO? $300 spiral binder, assigned to you, cannot be transferred.
So, are books not too expensive? Depends on the type of book.
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! (sold as bundle: book + exercise manual + solutions manual). When your real prices are higher than the pricing people use as hyperbole, you know there is a problem.
It makes no sense—for a subject that has been around for 300+ years, and virtually unchanged for the past 100.
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.
https://store.doverpublications.com/pages/math-science
On the order of $10 each - small paperbacks.
Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.
And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.
This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.
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.
But yes, standards and certifications are horrible.
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
College textbook pricing is a function of the aforementioned rate of increase of everything else becoming more expensive, not a function of the cost of books increasing generally. They are, the author argues, decreasing, unless you introduce external distorting factors.
The article is correct that recreational books are below for cumulative CPI. College textbooks on the other hand are at ~ 3 times the rate of general inflation.
Source:
BLS CPI-U (FRED: CPIAUCSL)
BLS "Educational Books and Supplies" (FRED: CUSR0000SEEA, ~767 in Mar 2026, base 1982-84=100)
BLS "Recreational Books" (FRED: CUUR0000SERG02, base Dec 1997=100, recently ~96-100
(just search for the above, and follow the link to https://fred.stlouisfed.org)
> the author is wrong about textbooks.
The author didn't write an article about college textbooks, he wrote a response to an article about mass market books and affordability.
The forces which have made college textbooks (and college educations in general) unprecedentedly expensive, real though they are, have little to do with this article.
Edit: I re-read my original comment and I probably wasn't clear enough. The external distorting factor is the higher education system absolutely exploding costs of everything to do with higher education, from predatory professors and textbook companies to the rent-seeking and regulatory capture of higher education institutions. College textbooks got incredibly expensive for reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the actual costs associated with making books, which are arguably cheaper than they've ever been.
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.
⸻
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.
So if books are expensive then our taxes buy fewer books.
San Francisco public libraries spend $200m per year, of which 15% is spent on 'collections', including books, ebooks, magazines etc.
That's $35 per resident. The denominator includes newborns, infants and others that can't read or don't like to read.
One reason I say SFPL is great for all^H^H^H many Californians+ is their book collection is available for free pickup at a your local library via the inter-library sharing program, Link+ [1].
((People, submit purchase requests at your local libraries. It's what it's for.))
The other is that they are subscribers to "O'Reilly for Public Libraries", which lets people access Everything from O'Reilly for Free [2].
[0]: https://sfpl.org/
Libraries themselves (and by extension, taxpayers) suffer from high book prices.
Separately, would you mind explaining this part, as I'm not familiar with university libraries: "Even most university libraries are switching to digital collections which can't be loaned out."
Does this mean you can only read the digital collections when physically present in the library, or that they're only available to members and not via inter-library loan?
A few years ago I suggested a book via this form: https://sfpl.org/services/ask-librarian/suggest-title I never received any response.
I've since (very recently) learned there's another way to suggest titles here: https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/user_dashboard#overlay456
Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.
Most of the books I've bought got read by me, and then sit on a shelf forever. If a book is bought by a library, and used multiple times before it's weeded, that's a big win for $/read.
> Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.
I think the library is suggesting a 10 year old book might be better accessed through other means. Can you get it from interlibrary loan? Is it available on the used market? It may not be available through the library's usual sourcing, etc.
The book in question is still in print and still available new.
If they had a copy that wore out and it was circulated many times, they would have reordered it when they discarded it.
When I was a teen I got my local library to acquire copies of a number of tech classics:
SICP, K&R, Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated, ANSI CL, ... all discarded to my everlasting disappointment.
And I can't request a copy because it's too old.
https://mtpfriends.bigcartel.com/product/what-s-more-punk-ad...
Some universities have it, but the only copy in CA public libraries seems to be at the Sharp Park branch in Pacifica (which I believe was acquired in the last couple of years - good on them!).
Berkeley public library has copies of the JS edition for what that's worth..
https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...
Most library users select from the books on the shelf.
That's like saying you shouldn't write a book because no one wanted it in the past, before it existed.
And I can't request a copy because it's too old.
Do you believe that no one in San Francisco ever wanted to read SICP?
https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/97320
Worldcat says it's at 1483 libraries: https://search.worldcat.org/title/Structure-and-interpretati... (although some of them may not participate in ILL, and some may only have eBooks that you probably can't borrow unless you have an appropriate account)
I'm sure SFPL does tracking on ILL requests and if something comes up more than once or twice in a reasonable period and it's available for purchase, a copy will be purchased to add to the collection.
Request physical copies of books you want to read, and that you think are beneficial to the community. And check them out from time to time.
I'm sure a librarian does their best to keep abreast with the latest best books.. but would they know the field better than someone in it?
I've been told they have experts that consult on title selection. But based on the 004-006 section at most libraries, I can only infer that is the IT guy at the senior center..
If the library buys it, that patron will come..
Basically, they will buy books that nobody's had a chance to review yet or talk about, but won't buy books published a year ago that everyone cites and recommends. It's a broken policy.
I'd say it is a way to avoid the high cost of books tho, in that they are a shared resource. Dozens of people may check out a single copy within a year. E-books at public libraries are more accessible, but only a finite number of copies may be accessed by patrons at a time - less accessible than you might think. Additionally, e-books are not owned, but leased. And the cost is substantial and comparable to the cost of a physical copy, and re-paid every few years.
Another way libraries avoid the cost of new books is by relying on other libraries to expand their collection. When my local library joined LINK+, for instance, they substantially decreased the amount of new books they would acquire, and it's stripping influence from the individual patron. Good luck borrowing a copy of Laws of Software Engineering [0] anywhere. Or Crafting Interpreters [1].
As far as university collections go, most have large libraries with huge collections that are available to borrow - somehow. But most of the books are very old. The new acquisitions are primarily digital and may only be accessed through a locked terminal or web portal. Whether the general public has access varies and often costs quite a bit or is free for the immediate community.
Here is info on borrowing at a few:
https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/find/borrow-renew
($100/yr for CA residents, limited access to the library, no remote access)
https://library.claremont.edu/borrowing/
(limited to nearby county residents, but free. no remote access or ebooks)
https://library.stanford.edu/about-stanford-libraries/visito...
(range of options: $1000/yr to $35/two-weeks, remote unclear)
I have had some luck accessing some e-books at some colleges, but for the most part you need to have a login. It really depends on their policies and licensing deals with digital publishers.
The total is $235 per resident per year.
But my point above wasn't about whether that number is high or low. It's that the price of books is paid by us, even it's funneled through taxes and librarians.
Seems like good value to me.
What do you think is the mean number of library books read by a San Francisco resident per year?
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.
But objectively my reaction is wrong. Books are not mystical objects to be revered. They are objects to be used. Nearly all books end up in a landfill or recycled eventually. What does it actually matter if they end up there covered in annotations and filled with dog eared pages?
Books you have borrowed? Absolutely do not write in them or dogear pages. Books you intend to share with others? Generally the same. Rare books or valuable books? Of course. Normal books you got on Amazon or from your local bookstore that you use only for your personal enjoyment? Use them how you want.
I'm not being black and white like that. Some books "are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out" others should be treated with more care.
For an extreme example: if somehow you come to possess the Book of Kells, don't go scribbling your brain farts all over it. You're a modern person who can easily buy paper or a notebook to hold such things.
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 bookstores a debt of gratitude. I am deeply saddened by the death of the used bookstore and still try to buy a stack of books whenever I am traveling and find a store.
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.
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.
Why not just buy the thing you are pirating? That would seem to be the easiest way to give someone money.
For 99%+ of authors, writing is a hobby that pays less than minimum wage. For self published authors it's often a net loss after costs like editors and cover design.
I rarely see the ebooks cost more than print, they're usually slightly cheaper. But the reason they aren't drastically cheaper is that a significant portion of the cost of a book isn't actually in the paper or the printing, it's in paying the author, editors, designers, marketers, etc. All of those people are crucial to the book publishing process, whether it's print or digital or, usually, both.
Not an expert but my guess is that price is supply and demand. And oversupply of physical books will drive the price down since it costs money to warehouse them. There cannot be an oversupply of ebooks.
Well, if you bought Kindle, then I see, but... don't buy Kindle? There are plenty other options.
The same authors usually have blog posts that should have been tweets.
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.
Do you really think that non-fiction is exclusively written in english?
I was very reluctant to make the move at first, as I love everything about physical books -- their feel, the way they smell, the cover art -- but I was accumulating too many, and finding space was becoming a hassle. The adjustment period was short, and now I'd rather have my reader over a physical book.
The only exceptions I'd make are for reference books that don't have good electronic versions on account of graphics or tables that don't render properly.
But I realize that I have a better and cozier feeling holding a physical book to read. As I get older, that also means I cannot deal with Paperbacks (especially in India where the quality is as bad as it gets). Buying only Hardcovers makes me choose my books wisely and feel immensely satisfied reading books.
Unfortunately, with all the things happening with Amazon—Kindle, I have done away with Kindle and sold them except for a Paperwhite that I want as my gadget/device museum piece.
I have too many books that I want to get back to, so I might just keep one but looks like Amazon is not making it easy to archive books.
Now, I’m on a lookout for an Open Source but well designed eBook Reader, akin to the Framework computers but for ebooks. I would like to still keep the physical to ebook ratio to a good number; for every 5 ebooks, I should have at-least 2 physical ones.
I like and use both, but yeah the feeling just isn’t the same reading on a screen vs a nice folio society hardcover.
I grew up having a lot of books around, mostly non-fiction, mostly from library book sales, garage sales, and used bookstores. There is a magnetic pull to a large well sorted bookcase. Pair it with a comfortable chair free of distractions. The best entertainment to my mind.
This is a parallel story for me to vinyl / streaming for music
There are some books and albums I want as physical artefacts, their aesthetic and tactile presence in my world means something more than just the content, you're right, the smell, the art, their feel
Then there are some that are _just_ content, they get streamed and bought as ebooks for just convienence and consumption
It's like guys buying fancy cars and motorbikes to polish them in the garage, rather than riding them.
And same thing frankly for vinyl collecting vs digital music files.
And that assumes you find a DRM free copy at all.
When I can get a godsdamned file and view it on whatever I want with whatever program I want, sure. But I usually can’t.
For another thing, I don't need to worry about charging a paper book and I don't need to have a battery pack and cables to read a book if the power is out or I'm somewhere without electricity. That's probably not a concern for most of the folks on HN but I personally prefer having a reduced infrastructural dependence for certain activities.
Reading on a screen also destroys my attention span. Again, that's not necessarily a common concern for most people but if I'm reading anything heavier than Raymond Chandler, I feel like my brain turns to oatmeal on an e-reader or a computer screen.
I have hundreds of books. All but... I dunno, fewer than a hundred, were purchased used. Tens of the ones purchased new, were cheap Dover Thrift editions (they're so cheap that if you're paying shipping on used, you can often pay barely-more and just buy new).
Ebooks only improve my costs if I pirate.
Usually I know exactly which book I need for a given occasion: Sitting on a bus for a while = take my fiction; waiting in a ferry line = take my Japanese textbook; going mushroom hunting = mushroom book obv.
I don’t think I’ve ever been at a place where I did bring a book but wished I had brought a different book. And as such I have a hard time seeing the value in being able to access my entire library wherever I want.
I've switched to ebooks almost entirely, they're cheap enough to buy just out of interest, and they leave space free for the books I care about enough to put physical copies in a shelf.
Besides the US, the places I grew up in all seemed to have much cheaper books, though as a tradeoff they didn't seem to have strong public library systems.
This is all without getting into the college textbook cartel.
I read an average of 50 books a year, so I spend about 250 hours a year reading. I usually spend between $10-$35 on a book, so I will spend between $500-$1,750 on books in a year. This comes out to $2-$7 per hour of entertainment.
This price range is a premium price range for home entertainment, but not absurd. For that premium price I get a lot of objectively good benefits associated with reading such as increased vocabulary and improved attention span.
If I found the price to be higher than my entertainment budget, I would have other options such as using a cheaper e-reader option, selling old books, or using a local library. Reading can be as cheap as you want it to be, or it can be a very expensive hobby if you start chasing first editions and author signatures.
I assumed (naively) that the electronic version would be the cost of the pulp version minus the cost of the pulp and printing and also minus the cost of shipping.
Author, publisher, editor still get their same cut.
In fact with DRM, the price should even be less that the above since there are no used-book sales lost.
I buy lots of used books, and also access e-books (sometimes the same books).
Mostly I enjoy e-books for use with text-to-speech. If I'm reading a book, I usually am only reading that book and don't need thousands in my device. And I will take that book with me everywhere. However, I also will seek out multiple books to compare and contrast a specific concept simultaneously.
Favorite aspect of e-books: sharing annotations
Favorite aspect of physical books: curious onlookers will strike up conversations
(also, physical books are tangible assets)
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.
It worth noting that books can be decor. To the point where people who don't read buy them for decoration.
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.
Walking around in an Australian bookstore at least I am still a bit flabbergasted by how everything is printed to be huge, everything a slightly different size, lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.
Not that I think this is a "cost of materials" thing in itself. But it all compounds on itself to where now a bookstore is huge to have just some random nonsense, and people will probably buy 2 instead of 3 books.
I agree that books are probably not "too expensive", I just wish that the mass market paperbacks would be smaller more straightforward and less of a precious little item.
To anyone interested in this stuff and in Tokyo(... well, Saitama), the Kadokawa Culture Museum [0] is ... probably the biggest building commemorating a publishing house in the world? The pictures don't do it justice, the building is ginormous.
But in it there's a bit of a (corporate approved) history of Kadokawa built into the museum. Their core thing that found them success: standardising a small pocketbook format for printing their books, having almost everything print to that size, with the same font etc, and selling it at a low enough price that college students could buy more books than they could ever read.
Printing all your cheap stuff in A6 sizes mean you can have a _loooot_ of books at home before worrying about much.
Glossy cover lamination is actually cheaper than matte lamination.
If you meant more fancier finishing like spot UV or foil-stamping, ignore what I said.
Japanese paperbacks tend to use dust covers instead. Dunno if that's cheaper or not, but it seems like it.
I’d also want to show my appreciation for Italian publishers, for some of them, at least, the quality of their some of their books can be quite high (Laterza and Einaudi from the top of my head, but there are others, too).
If I buy a new book I want to buy it from such an independent shop - ideally when an author gives a talk and I can get it signed.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/capitol-hil...
Most books don't sell a ton of copies, so there usually isn't a lot of profit left over after those costs.
That said, the bigger issue is likely perception. The value of a book is lowered by the free reading material you can find online. An ereader is roughly the price of an archaic feeling dead-tree textbook. The glut of books chasing market trends means that you are more likely to end up with chaff than wheat. While the great books may be worth their sticker price, the pedestrian ones definitely have to compete with those perceptions.
Of course, this makes me choose my books wisely and with intention. I’m still on the lookout for an ebook reader (no more Kindles). I still want to keep a good ratio where for every 5 ebooks, I should have at least 2 physical books.
So, books are NOT cheap, but the cost is what to consider if it is “worth it” to you.
My problem with physical books is mostly the physical storage space. I have to be really careful not to fill the house with them.
And there's stuff much cheaper than MMPB but they're very rare (think phonebooks and old catalogs).
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.
I don’t read enough, but when I did I borrowed most books and only bought the ones I wanted to read again.
- Make paper somewhere
- Ship paper to China
- Print the book in China
- Ship the book back across the ocean to the publisher's distribution center
- Ship the book the bookstore to shelve
- Ship the book back to the publisher if it doesn't sell
The CO2e of all of these steps must be crazy compared to an ebook and ereader for most any serious reader.
Anyone know of a definitive study on this? Here is a blog post about it: https://sites.uw.edu/libraryvoices/2025/01/13/battle-of-the-...
China has become popular in recent years because a number of printers offer special editions - sprayed/deckled edges, high quality hard binding - which authors can sell as high-margin items to genre fiction collectors.
Generally, the print industry is incredibly destructive. In addition to all the shipping, it literally eats forests and uses huge quantities of water.
Although most of my book purchases have been kids books or textbooks. Maybe that is the reason.
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.
How exactly did the law change? I can see them costing as an expense in the year published and not counted as revenue until sold (that's a "tax advantage") - but having to pay tax each year on inventory? That's more than just removing a tax advantage.
- old law: tax is deferred until item is sold
- new law: tax is owed on property in inventory each year until sold
There were hearings on Congress and Librarians holding marches protesting the bill, but it all seems to have faded away into obscurity and the new status quo.
This type of "property" tax is very rare except on physical real estate (at least in US) but it might be they did that. If so, it'd destroy the long tail entirely, so much so that I'd think print on demand companies like Amazon were behind the tax bill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlist
>In the US, backlist and midlist publications were negatively affected by the US Supreme Court decision in the 1979 case Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. This decision reinterpreted rules for inventory depreciation, changing how book publishers had to account for unsold inventory each year, and their ability to depreciate it. Because stocks of unsold books could no longer be written down without proof of value, it became more efficient tax-wise for companies to simply destroy inventory.
[1] : https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an... [2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
Also, just do softcover or hardcover - or let use choose either from the publish date. Why do I have to wait for a softcover?
Having said that, I think the complaints about book prices are mostly an excuse for preferring to spend time on social media or download pirated books for free.
Leaving aside the question of whether they're priced "correctly", books are cheaper than a Doordash meal or a computer game we buy and never finish. Would the average person really read more books if they were $4.99 instead of $29.95?
Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.
(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)
As a data point I'm reading some series I enjoyed the first 2 volumes of. I just picked up the next 7 ones because they were there and each of em were ~$5. Wouldn't have done that if they were $30, and I'm not guaranteed to get to the end!
Well it doesn't matter. Even if you compare to books that are newly published, new hardcover fiction is not $43-54. Typical is about $30.
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.
No it doesn't!
EBITDA is not standardized metric. It's not defined under GAAP or IFRS. Companies calculate it differently, often adjusting it in ways that make their results look better.
If you want a 'standard profit metric', use net income. That one is actually defined under GAAP and IFRS.
The standardised measures can be manipulated too.
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.
The whole point of EBITDA is, as I said, to eliminate the effect of capital structures.
EBITDA margin is not meaningful between dissimilar industries. I am not sure what would be best. Some sort of return on investment measure.
I think calling it a profit measure is fine.
https://www.humblebundle.com/books
(Particularly from O'Reilly, No Starch, Manning, ... )
Like I feel the paper is not of the same quality. Maybe it's because they now print them on demand ?
Boycott Amazon, Buycott Local and support your neighbors
About a buck per non-ad page.
(This is where many used book stores get the bulk of their stock, aside from, these days, buying out other used book stores that are closing)
I think it depends. I used to buy hardcopy books on Amazon, in particular scientific books. They were usually worth their money, but still it did cost a lot.
When Amazon Prime came, I noticed the quality of amazon went downwards a lot. There were additional reasons - e. g. the USA under Trump becoming hostile to Europeans - so I decided to abandon Amazon completely. Never regretted that move either. But for the most part, I also stopped buying hardcopy books; the cost was one factor, but storing books was another big one. I still have books but I don't want to keep on adding more and more books that I may read once and then never again. For the most part I transitioned into .pdf books (I hate epub format though, so I don't use that).
Some time ago I had to purchase a book for a local discussion; it did cost less than 10 euros, so that was not much (it was a thin book though, about 200 pages in DIN A5 format, e. g. the small format). That cost was not too high. I am not a "zero hardcopy books" person, but the books I purchase are significantly fewer compared to, say, 15 years ago. I still like books; easier to concentrate without being distracted, but I kind of prefer not having a lot of books in my apartment. It just is easier to organize things when I don't have to shuffle the physical location of hardcopy books.
The books on amazon were very expensive though, so I disagree on the title chosen. I think amazon became too expensive and the quality became worse. People who still use amazon should seriously consider whether they really need amazon in their life.
A lot of print-on-demand "hardcovers" are just perfect-bound text blocks glued into a hard cover. So disappointing.
Online DRMed or "streamed" books can be modified or deleted.
Its kinda hard (aka impossible) to edit or delete a hardbound book on my bookshelf remotely.
If the fucks like Altman and ilk can run 'pirate everything and sell the proceeds', you damned right I'll pirate without selling anything. And I won't even feel bad.
The professional pirates normally were charged criminally. Nope, now theyre too big to fail.
What better way to stand up to Sam Altman than doing exactly what he did?
> 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, healthcare, or admission to sporting events, movies, and concerts
that's a pretty wild set of things to compare to..
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
so they are _indeed_ too expensive, but it's not their fault?
> When people say they want cheap books, they forget there are many other interested players at the table: authors, agents, publishers, bookstores, book distributors, and so on.
I genuinely don't care about the middlemen and supply chain, the very expectation that a book purchase comes after careful and deliberate consideration of all the tertiary factors and relevant economic forces only reenforces the idea that *books are too expensive*
> I spent over a decade at Thomas Nelson Publishers.
There you go...
I would say I'm an avid reader and spend a lot more than the average person on books, but prices are absolutely wild. When you start comparing them to movies, sporting events and concerts (healthcare!?!) you're putting them appropriately in the category of big indulgence.
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.
The article contradicts itself when you verify it.
Tolkien's Fellowship was $7 in 2000 using the given inflation calculator it would be $13 today (not more than $50 as mentioned in the article??? They probably set the date at over 50 years ago) todays edition of the book is $20 (not the $13 it should have been with inflation) and the hardcover version is at $30.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fellowship-of-the-ring-...
> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
Books became more expensive as everything else.