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To 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 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.
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! (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.
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 <pay book price> = free A / course requirement lol
Where I studied in the UK the university provided all books. Which meant they had a lot more negotiating power, because they wouldn't pay £300 a book nor allow a professor to have a £300 book as a requirement for the course. So companies had to make sure their material was within the price range that universities were willing to pay for it.
In Germany I spent exactly 0 dollars/euros on books in university. We got access to a huge amounts of ebooks through the university network and profs never required a specific one and would just recommend a few. One of these was always available. This free access was of course covered by the 250 euros per semester tuition…
But yes, standards and certifications are horrible.
The central thesis of the article is this:
> 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.
When 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 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.
Alternatively I visit a book store every 5 or 7 years when we visit relatives. It's a big old barn of a used bookstore. I remember quite clearly in high school seeing a specific chess book, for $20! When I returned many years later it was still there. I will never, ever, learn all the opening moves to the italian defense but, i know the book is there if i ever need it.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The 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.
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.
At some point you just have to move to Ebooks. It's way cheaper (usually ~6x cheaper) and it's much more convenient, as you always have your entire library with you. Sometimes even in duplicate, i.e. on more than one device at the same time, in the same place.
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.
Many 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.
I'm not very convinced by the thesis of this post. When I look at book prices, I'm not thinking "well they're cheaper when adjusted for inflation!". I'm thinking "damn, this costs way too much to buy unless I am certain I'd enjoy it".
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.
Yall know ebay exists right? Clearly the majority of humans would rather buy items that are pre-owned instead of new. To kill a mocking bird is 4.39 free shipping. Books along with alot of other things are not rare commodities, there quiet the opposite. Book resellers struggle to sell books infact many book sellers have the hardest time reselling these heavy paper things with words on it because theres to many of them online! Buy pre-owned you wont know the difference and sometimes the difference is cheaper.
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.)
Japan and France to me stand out as places where pop culture-y books are really fairly priced. And both of these are places where there are established printing formats that don't try to make the books huge.
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.
eBooks (ePubs) are too expensive.
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'm seeing books get released for 60/70$ a pop now in the tech market. That's insane. I don't mind the 35-40$ price which is kind of pricey, and books have a short shelf life.
I tend to get an average of 5 hours of enjoyment while reading a novel book, usually divided into about 10 thirty minute sessions.
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've never been a big buyer of new books since they were always kinda expensive. That was especially true as a child. It is still somewhat true as an adult. The place where I notice the greatest change in price is in the used end of the market, and that is mostly because the types of places where I would source cheap books seem to be less common. (When I do stumble across those places today, they are just as cheap. Maybe cheaper. Yet they are also harder to find.)
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.
This 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.
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.
eBay->title search->sort price low to high-> usually results in under $5 free shipping for almost any oldish book. Also for some reason the sellers on eBay are almost always cheaper (sometimes significantly) than their Alibris/Abe/Amazon storefront counterparts. Same with Thriftbooks, cheaper on their eBay storefront than direct, especially since TB raised their free shipping minimum...
¿por qué no los dos?
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)
I 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 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.
The 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."
If the price was the cause of people reading less, you’d expect to see libraries become overwhelmed with traffic.
I don’t read enough, but when I did I borrowed most books and only bought the ones I wanted to read again.
Information and entertainment are less scarce today than the 1960s. Expensive is not just relative to what it used to cost, but also relative to value.
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.
I think an issue that isn't addressed is that books feel more expensive not compared to the 60s benchmark, but say compared to free online resources with comparable information. I'm defaulting more to online circulated pdf books and only buy the book when I have liked it and want the physical copy as a keepsake.
I agree books, in general, aren't too expensive. But, I'm surprised at the variance in book prices. Some great technical books are $30, others $65. Of course, textbooks take that to the extreme.
Also, just do softcover or hardcover - or let use choose either from the publish date. Why do I have to wait for a softcover?
Sort of on topic but I wonder about the CO2e or energy cost of books. My friend recently opened a book store and the supply chain seems crazy:
- 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-...
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.
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.
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 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 $29.95?
Plus, back of the napkin cost shows it is not that expensive.
30$ (or 20€) times 52 weeks : 1560$ (1040€)
Not cheap but less than 5% of a minimum yearly salary of 32k$. [1]
Same in most occidental europe. [2]
And not everyone reads a book a week (if only so…)
[1] : https://www.bls.gov/cew/publications/employment-and-wages-an... [2] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...
I remember some great tech bookshops of yore. Computer Literacy [0] for one. Seattle has Ada's Technical Books [1].
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...
Two days ago, I purchased Timothy Snyder's two most recent books from a local bookstore for $40. (On Tyranny & On Freedom) What should be cheaper are school and textbooks. Those seem priced like a racket.
Boycott Amazon, Buycott Local and support your neighbors
my actual problem with books is that you can't change the font or font size, and you can't do dark mode. Maybe if I get cataract surgery it might not matter as much.
The floor price of books is higher these days because the ordinary paperback is dead and and trade-paperbacks are the lowest cost option and they tend to be most of the cost of a hardback.
The quality of books is horrible these days though.
Like I feel the paper is not of the same quality. Maybe it's because they now print them on demand ?
"EBITDA serves as a standard profit metric across companies and industries"
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.
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.
Summary: Inflation is a thing. Publishers on average get 5%-15% EBITDA which is lower than many other generic industries.
Great source for cheap, DRM free e-books:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books
(Particularly from O'Reilly, No Starch, Manning, ... )