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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.
> 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.
Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
>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.
The thinking is the sold product is the inferior product than the pirated version and so rather than reward the people making it worse (Amazon, mostly), trying to reward the person who made something you want in the first place
To quantify that: If the author has self-published on Amazon, 35%-70% goes to the author. (70% above a certain price threshold and assuming the e-book is exclusive to KDP) If published via a publisher, the author is more likely to be getting 10%-15%.
I haven't done the research recently, but I assume that the cost of printing and distributing physical books is still less than a lot of people assume it is.
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.
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.
During its early days (2009), an investor showed me a white Kindle reading a book. This was India, long before Amazon was even introduced to our country. I decided to get mine a few years later. I decided to move bag and baggage to ebooks. After some time, I got one for my daughter too. Then the Kindle Oasis was, to me, one of the best ways to read books.
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.
There’s this great feeling standing infront of a couple loaded billy bookcases trying to pick what to read that i just don’t get from looking at the directory listing on my kobo. (I can reccommend a kobo, it runs linux and with koreader you can even open a terminal emulator on it, ssh into it etc).
I like and use both, but yeah the feeling just isn’t the same reading on a screen vs a nice folio society hardcover.
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
Never. It never makes sense to me, why would I want to carry around another computer to read? Why can’t I unplug and enjoy my book? I tried it, it sucked and management was even worse.
People should never buy an ebook which they cannot make a copy that is readable anywhere, extra steps required or not. There are so many disadvantages to even list.
an ebook that's yours to download is one thing, an ebook that you lose access to once your subscription ends is another. vendors love locking you into a platform and having you "buy" content that's never really yours.
I have plenty of ebooks, and the main advantage there, for me, is the info density. But there are still advantages to paper books. For one thing, I can't have my paper books revoked after purchase, something that happened to me more than once on amazon before I wised up and started downloading my books to my PC (before they went and made that impossible). I don't shop at amazon much for anything these days but it could happen anywhere with DRM. (which is another advantage; I don't have to waste time stripping the DRM off of paper books).
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).
If I squint my eyes I can maybe picture my self reading parts of 5 different books in a single day. A fiction novel (1), a Japanese textbook (2), a Japanese vocab book (3), a coffee table book I just happen to need a particular trivia from (4), and a mushroom hunting book (5).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
I can confirm that French paperbacks are in a league of their own, my almost weekly purchases at the French bookstore here in Bucharest are a example of that (never visited Japan, but a French friend of mine who’s also a book rat and who staid in Tokyo for about a year told me about the same you’re saying about them). On the other hand I could never understand the Anglos’ infatuation with a book not being serious enough if it’s not hardback, maybe a reflection of their castle-owning days, when one had enough space to store them. I’m kidding, but only by half.
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).
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...
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 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.
I guess the hardcovers are better because they are not printed in India. From what I've seen with nonfiction books, the ones printed in India are only softcovers—pathetic paper/build quality, and poor readability because they're smaller than their US counterpart (usually 19.8 cm long in India compared to 23.5 cm in the US), and the US layout is shrunk to fit the Indian size. So, any hardcover is imported from the US and thus of better quality.
It is especially true for MMPBs (mass market paperbacks). It's a specific term for a specific format of books that are just recently being phased out. You can find more info about this online.
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?
> 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?
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!
> 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.
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 $30.
Jesus, people are paying that much for books? Even buying them new, I often pick up a paperback from a high street shop in the UK for about £8? Maybe £12 sometimes? And that's not including the used bookshop I go to sometimes that will have books for £2-3. Sure, they're not hardbacks, or large reference textbooks, but to get a story to read is pretty affordable
I'm seeing books get released for 60/70$ 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.
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.
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?
Textbooks are the real killer; soaking of a captive audience that has to buy what the professor/school requires (often after making their own deals with the publishers). It's especially annoying when school adds its own random books to the program.
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
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.
Yes, I agree. Libgen, Scihub, Anna's Library, and Archive.org with de-DRM is completely free.
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.
Many new trade hardcover books will not last that long. I work at a university press, and we still use acid-free paper, quarter-cloth bindings, sturdy boards, and other niceties that the big trade houses are increasingly giving up on. Guess what? Most of our books cost more than $30, or even $40.
> 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.
I wouldn’t say they’re wild and I have a big book buying habit.
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.
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.
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.
> If you want to learn something new, you better learn to read English
Do you really think that non-fiction is exclusively written in english?
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.
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.
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.
This is the kind of thing that is counted as "economic growth", too.
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
> I had one professor in college who made most of their money by forcing students to buy his book
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.
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.
poppycock. the author is wrong about textbooks.
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)
I also heard tell the illustrated manuscripts market is soaring.
> 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.
Only for commodity goods does the cost of production impact the price. As substitutionality lessens, the price more and more approaches the value delivered.
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.
Unfortunate, I would pay $30 for 50~60 pages of real content.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
The thinking is the sold product is the inferior product than the pirated version and so rather than reward the people making it worse (Amazon, mostly), trying to reward the person who made something you want in the first place
Because significantly less of the money you pay goes to the person who wrote the book.
To quantify that: If the author has self-published on Amazon, 35%-70% goes to the author. (70% above a certain price threshold and assuming the e-book is exclusive to KDP) If published via a publisher, the author is more likely to be getting 10%-15%.
Calibre (though this is not so simple with Amazon ebooks since they disabled downloading books to your PC)
Because you're primarily paying for the copyright. The cost of a book is fairly trivial
Not with paper prices where they are these days.
I haven't done the research recently, but I assume that the cost of printing and distributing physical books is still less than a lot of people assume it is.
> (or often more) than the paperback
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.
On the other hand, there cannot (physically at least) be a supply shortage of ebooks.
Is it hard to buy non-DRM books?
Well, if you bought Kindle, then I see, but... don't buy Kindle? There are plenty other options.
Where can I buy DRM free Anathem? The Road? Hunger Games?
Care to share these other options?
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.
During its early days (2009), an investor showed me a white Kindle reading a book. This was India, long before Amazon was even introduced to our country. I decided to get mine a few years later. I decided to move bag and baggage to ebooks. After some time, I got one for my daughter too. Then the Kindle Oasis was, to me, one of the best ways to read books.
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.
There’s this great feeling standing infront of a couple loaded billy bookcases trying to pick what to read that i just don’t get from looking at the directory listing on my kobo. (I can reccommend a kobo, it runs linux and with koreader you can even open a terminal emulator on it, ssh into it etc).
I like and use both, but yeah the feeling just isn’t the same reading on a screen vs a nice folio society hardcover.
> At some point you just have to move to Ebooks.
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
Where do you find e-books that are several times cheaper than paperback? Sometimes they're half the price, but often they aren't cheaper at all.
And that assumes you find a DRM free copy at all.
Never. It never makes sense to me, why would I want to carry around another computer to read? Why can’t I unplug and enjoy my book? I tried it, it sucked and management was even worse.
Agreed. A bookshelf is great, and bookmarks are great. Cognitive load of using a tablet to load and flip through pages? Not so great
> At some point you just have to move to Ebooks.
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.
People should never buy an ebook which they cannot make a copy that is readable anywhere, extra steps required or not. There are so many disadvantages to even list.
an ebook that's yours to download is one thing, an ebook that you lose access to once your subscription ends is another. vendors love locking you into a platform and having you "buy" content that's never really yours.
I have plenty of ebooks, and the main advantage there, for me, is the info density. But there are still advantages to paper books. For one thing, I can't have my paper books revoked after purchase, something that happened to me more than once on amazon before I wised up and started downloading my books to my PC (before they went and made that impossible). I don't shop at amazon much for anything these days but it could happen anywhere with DRM. (which is another advantage; I don't have to waste time stripping the DRM off of paper books).
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.
> It's way cheaper (usually ~6x cheaper)
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.
If I squint my eyes I can maybe picture my self reading parts of 5 different books in a single day. A fiction novel (1), a Japanese textbook (2), a Japanese vocab book (3), a coffee table book I just happen to need a particular trivia from (4), and a mushroom hunting book (5).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G5U9S1dit2KJvEQVA
I can confirm that French paperbacks are in a league of their own, my almost weekly purchases at the French bookstore here in Bucharest are a example of that (never visited Japan, but a French friend of mine who’s also a book rat and who staid in Tokyo for about a year told me about the same you’re saying about them). On the other hand I could never understand the Anglos’ infatuation with a book not being serious enough if it’s not hardback, maybe a reflection of their castle-owning days, when one had enough space to store them. I’m kidding, but only by half.
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).
> lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.
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.
yeah I was thinking of the foil stamping etc... maybe it just looks fancier to me (and hence why they do it I guess??)
Japanese paperbacks tend to use dust covers instead. Dunno if that's cheaper or not, but it seems like it.
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...
bookfinder.com is what you're looking for
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 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.
I guess the hardcovers are better because they are not printed in India. From what I've seen with nonfiction books, the ones printed in India are only softcovers—pathetic paper/build quality, and poor readability because they're smaller than their US counterpart (usually 19.8 cm long in India compared to 23.5 cm in the US), and the US layout is shrunk to fit the Indian size. So, any hardcover is imported from the US and thus of better quality.
For the reader, Kobos are a solid choice that can run open source software (and the software exists, it's not theoretical).
My problem with physical books is mostly the physical storage space. I have to be really careful not to fill the house with them.
So the print in hardbacks is better quality than paperbacks? I had no idea.
It is especially true for MMPBs (mass market paperbacks). It's a specific term for a specific format of books that are just recently being phased out. You can find more info about this online.
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?
> 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?
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!
> 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.
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 $30.
Jesus, people are paying that much for books? Even buying them new, I often pick up a paperback from a high street shop in the UK for about £8? Maybe £12 sometimes? And that's not including the used bookshop I go to sometimes that will have books for £2-3. Sure, they're not hardbacks, or large reference textbooks, but to get a story to read is pretty affordable
I'm seeing books get released for 60/70$ 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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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?
Textbooks are the real killer; soaking of a captive audience that has to buy what the professor/school requires (often after making their own deals with the publishers). It's especially annoying when school adds its own random books to the program.
Summary: Inflation is a thing. Publishers on average get 5%-15% EBITDA which is lower than many other generic industries.
How about those $130 textbooks?
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
> It’s crazy how the prices of books have gone up
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.
Yes, I agree. Libgen, Scihub, Anna's Library, and Archive.org with de-DRM is completely free.
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.
I'm sure all the small authors trying to feed themselves will be very impressed about your brave anti-Altman stance.
What better way to stand up to Sam Altman than doing exactly what he did?
Can we get rid of hard cover books yet?
Not if we want them to survive in a decent condition for more than a couple of decades, no.
Many new trade hardcover books will not last that long. I work at a university press, and we still use acid-free paper, quarter-cloth bindings, sturdy boards, and other niceties that the big trade houses are increasingly giving up on. Guess what? Most of our books cost more than $30, or even $40.
Does your university press still sew signatures?
A lot of print-on-demand "hardcovers" are just perfect-bound text blocks glued into a hard cover. So disappointing.
Not at all.
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.
Plus old books have the best aroma and page coloring
The only one I'd want sadly is.. https://newandroidbook.com/
This seems really quite confused in its message.
> 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.
I wouldn’t say they’re wild and I have a big book buying habit.
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.