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pabosher

Why are books so goddamn expensive?

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I don't know if this is purely a UK problem, but I felt I needed to vent to the Idle Thumbs community:

So I was in Waterstone's earlier today, and saw some Sciencey books I wanted to buy. I pick up the first one, and it costs £13. For one softcover book. What is this shit? I have a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide Trilogy of Four at home that I picked up for £8RRP five years ago - now it costs that much for just one of the books contained therein.

Argh, why are bookstores so expensive? I know I can buy on Amazon, but there's something gratifying about picking up a book in a shop, thinking it looks awesome, and then just buying it.

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I'd say it's one part shop markup, one part getting back expenses (Hitchhiker sold so much already they can offer it for less, in theory, because all the costs have been redeemed a long time ago) and one part because they want to make a living out of it.

The fact of the matter is, you're not paying for the physical product at all, that's dirt cheap. Same goes for games. You're paying for the salaries, the advances, the author's cut, the shares, the office, the profit.

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With Hitchhiker's though, it's now £7.99 for just the first book on its own. As you say, all the major fees will have been taken care of long ago - books are just getting way more expensive, and it bums me out.

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I have a degree in 'Publishing' (these exist) and will hopefully soon have a job in the industry (but more likely in academic rather than trade). While I agree that books are expensive, and your example is a rip off, I'd like to add a few things:

  • Aside from huge bestsellers and various fringe cases, margins on new trade books are generally pretty low for the publisher and for most retailers depending on how they operate. This is why WHSmith molest you with chocolate oranges at the till.
  • Books are substantially cheaper in the UK than in a lot of other European countries which still have fixed prices (we got rid of the net book agreement in the 90s). They get annoyed when we complain.
  • Obvious, but very important: Amazon makes other places look expensive because they have the market share to demand massive discounts. If almost any other shop charged the same prices, they would be making a loss on every sale. It's a vicious cycle which only a few small publishers resist. Even if you refuse to supply your book to amazon, they still put up an 'out of stock' listing for your book which leads people to buy a used copy or to give up/forget.
  • This is why libraries exist, use them before they close them!

I wince and cry whenever I go into Blackwells and look at the beautiful new hardback history books for £60+. Then I go and download a dumb video game (which I can't resell or lend) for £30.

Sadly it's becoming more and more likely that physical books will become an expensive luxury sooner than many people think, and it will happen long before ebooks stop being shit.

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This makes me sad. When it comes to science, history books etc. I honestly believe they should be as near to free as possible - information shouldn't be restricted only to the wealthy, and cheaper books would encourage more to read I think. Obviously I know it's financially unviable to have such a system in place, but urgh. I just want to read interesting books, honest.

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They get annoyed when we complain.

This. Most of the books that get released here cost from 25 to 40€. The usual excuse is that it's a very small market. Usually the paperback version comes out in a year or two, costing around 15€, which is still expensive.

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The more specific, the more expensive the science books get. I have come across several 300 page books that cost more than £100 (and not because they are rare or anything). Scientific articles are also very expensive. Of course, neither of these are meant for the "general public", but still.

I buy my books almost exclusively from Amazon.co.uk for several reasons, mostly because the books I'm interested in are hard to find in Finland or else they are very expensive. As I rarely buy new books, I can't really complain about the price. In fact, I have often marveled at how cheap the books are as compared to many other forms of entertainment or culture (thanks in no small part to Amazon I admit).

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Yeah the textbooks I've had to buy for university have often set me back pretty substantially. More than one has been over £100, as Nappi mentioned, and that's even taking into account that they tend to be about half the price the university itself is attempting to charge me!

All of this said, I think another thing worth taking note of is that Waterstones specifically does tend to just overprice things fairly heavily by comparison to other retailers. Especially ones that can afford to work with a similar distribution model to Amazon.

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I often wonder this myself.

And then I follow up with wondering why DIGITAL COPIES are just as expensive as physical copies. UGH.

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In the EU, ebooks are subject to VAT whereas books are not. Everyone seems to agree that this is ludicrous and outdated, but it's taking forever to get it changed. France and Luxembourg have already reduced their ebook VAT, but the European Commission is grumbling about this because they're only supposed to do something like that along with everyone else.

Incidentally, Amazon UK sells all its ebooks from Luxembourg at 3% VAT.

Ebook pricing will improve, but unfortunately people seem perfectly happy with shitty typography, proprietary formats and DRM.

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When it comes to novels - I'm currently reading the Song of Ice and Fire series - I love using my Kindle. In my opinion it's just perfect for what I want. It's the case of textbooks where I want to flick back and forth, scribble unintelligible notes and generally LEARN that digital becomes impractical.

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Personally I think it's a pretty big shame that carefully designed typography is washed away by reflowable text and incredibly limited formatting, but font settings are nice to have. On top of that though, cheap ebook conversion practices have a nasty habit of unnecessarily missing out oddities like illustrated pre-title pages even if they're very deliberately designed. Books with lots of footnotes are horrible because they can't be footnotes anymore, you have to follow links back and forth. This kind of stuff wasn't thought through and now the leading format is a millstone round the neck. When you're making an ebook, doing the Kindle version is like making your website compatible with netscape navigator. It's such a shame because they're the best devices in a lot of ways, if they would just support EPUB, things would be so much better for everyone.

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Personally I think it's a pretty big shame that carefully designed typography is washed away by reflowable text and incredibly limited formatting

This is a big reason I still don't read ebooks. Maybe eventually the experience of reading an ebook will be a more beautiful one, but there are currently still far more things I prefer about physical books, and that's one of them. I'm reading Wolf Hall right now in hardback, and when I had first learned about the book I grabbed the first free chapter for the Kindle app on my Android phone and iPad, only to find that this particular book is introduced with several pages of character descriptions and other interesting context that was treated utterly carelessly in the ebook version (whether due to necessity thanks to reflowable/resizeable text, or simply due to different priorities, I don't know). Of course, in the hardbound version, those pages are typeset very well, with a beautiful ornate border surrounding the text, and the book as an entire object is a pleasure to own.

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I've finally got around to reading Infinite Jest, and it's actually the first book that's made me wish I had a kindle or equivalent. Typically I agree with you, but with this one the sheer size of it means that bringing it to work to read on my breaks is causing damage to my copy, it's hard to find a comfortable way to sit with it for long periods, etc etc. On the other hand, I also need two bookmarks for this book (one to keep track of where I am in the book, another for the footnotes) and I can't imagine skipping back and forth as I have to do so often would be convenient on a tablet-y thing. Y'know what, in writing this I've decided I'm glad I have a real copy. Paper for life, yo.

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I've finally got around to reading Infinite Jest, and it's actually the first book that's made me wish I had a kindle or equivalent. Typically I agree with you, but with this one the sheer size of it means that bringing it to work to read on my breaks is causing damage to my copy, it's hard to find a comfortable way to sit with it for long periods, etc etc. On the other hand, I also need two bookmarks for this book (one to keep track of where I am in the book, another for the footnotes) and I can't imagine skipping back and forth as I have to do so often would be convenient on a tablet-y thing. Y'know what, in writing this I've decided I'm glad I have a real copy. Paper for life, yo.

Yes, Infinite Jest resists easy reading, both literally and mentally.

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I've finally got around to reading Infinite Jest, and it's actually the first book that's made me wish I had a kindle or equivalent. Typically I agree with you, but with this one the sheer size of it means that bringing it to work to read on my breaks is causing damage to my copy, it's hard to find a comfortable way to sit with it for long periods, etc etc. On the other hand, I also need two bookmarks for this book (one to keep track of where I am in the book, another for the footnotes) and I can't imagine skipping back and forth as I have to do so often would be convenient on a tablet-y thing. Y'know what, in writing this I've decided I'm glad I have a real copy. Paper for life, yo.

In my experience, that much actually IS easy on Kindle. Just tap the indicator for the footnote, and then once you've read it, hit the back button.

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I so desire a Kindle. And Infinite Jest is on my list for footnoting pleasure.

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In my experience, that much actually IS easy on Kindle. Just tap the indicator for the footnote, and then once you've read it, hit the back button.

Are you using a touchscreen device? The regular kindle makes this kind of a pain, because in order to activate the link, you have to cursor your way around the screen to get to it. It sucks, especially compared with having the footnote simply sitting there visible at the bottom of the page. (Although it sounds like Infinite Jest has endnotes, which are a pain no matter what.)

For most of my reading, I'm perfectly happy with crappy ebooks (as long as they aren't full of OCR errors), but for harder to digest works, you'll have to pry my Norton Critical Editions from my RSI-afflicted hands.

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If you read lots of public domain works, then having an e-reader is almost a necessity. I've saved so much money and read so much more since I got my Kindle, just because every single public domain book was freely available to me at any time.

It's worth mentioning, however, that most of these ebooks are made by an open community that frequently pays little attention to quality control. I've notified Amazon when I find ebooks that have downright horribly formatting (I've seen ebooks with margins taking up half of the screen, enormous font sizes, inappropriate linebreaks everywhere, etc.) but to my knowledge they haven't done anything about fixing or removing the offending books. I once tried reading a book that had bits of every single paragraph in the entire book (as far as I could tell) missing. Amazon had it listed as the "official" Kindle version of that book, which means it shares reviews with regular print versions that don't have those issues.

In the end though, I've saved enough money that the inconvenience of running into a few bad apples is hardly a deterrent, but it's still an issue that needs to get sorted out somehow. I don't know how non-Amazon services fare in that regard.

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Amazon had it listed as the "official" Kindle version of that book, which means it shares reviews with regular print versions that don't have those issues.

Sorry, because this is a bit of a tangent, but this drives me absolutely batty. I can't deal with how Amazon has the one pool of reviews for every printing of a book or release of a movie or whatever. If you dig down into them, sometimes you'll find the one with a subject like "KINDLE VERSION IS BROKEN."

It can be really difficult to see what the word is on the actual thing you're trying to buy when there have been a bunch of editions.

edit: I have seen them remove especially bad Kindle editions when it's pointed out. It may take a certain critical mass of complaints.

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In my experience, that much actually IS easy on Kindle. Just tap the indicator for the footnote, and then once you've read it, hit the back button.

When describing Infinite Jest in an interview with Charlie Rose DFW talked about the use of extensive footnotes and how they shape the reading experience. From memory he related the disjointed effect of needing to flip back and forth while reading to the way life/entertainment/consumption has been evolving (I'm misquoting here but it was something along these lines). So eBooks are cheating!

(I have a hard cover first edition which has been staring at me for more than 5 years now)

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Sorry, because this is a bit of a tangent, but this drives me absolutely batty. I can't deal with how Amazon has the one pool of reviews for every printing of a book or release of a movie or whatever. If you dig down into them, sometimes you'll find the one with a subject like "KINDLE VERSION IS BROKEN."

It can be really difficult to see what the word is on the actual thing you're trying to buy when there have been a bunch of editions.

edit: I have seen them remove especially bad Kindle editions when it's pointed out. It may take a certain critical mass of complaints.

This is a big problem with Amazon's existing review system in general. Once upon a time, having reviews for a single product pooled across its various mediums may have made sense, but now it's ludicrous that I usually have to dig through three or four pages of often banal DVD reviews to find someone talking about the quality of the Blu-ray release. They are different products, which the complaint thread on the Amazon forums, the longest ever, can attest to.

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Having owned a few kindles, I never found the physical keyboard all that useful. I mostly just used it for searching the store or book text, and that was rare enough that the touch keyboard worked fine (even on the old IR touch screen model).

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