Books Should Be More Expensive
from the archives, updated
I originally published this in 2021; since then, the cost to produce a book has risen quite a bit—paper and printing costs have at least doubled. But comments about how books are too expensive are also more common, with consumers as well as indie booksellers citing overly high publisher-set prices. I maintain that for the most part, books are still too cheap, and propose a few ways we could all be more flexible about pricing.
Books used to be much more expensive than they are now. Since the 1980s, their costs have not kept up with inflation. And I am not referring here to Amazon discounting: publishers have been cheapening the cost of their commodities for decades.
For research, I pulled a few recently purchased used books from my shelf:
My edition of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters was published in 1959 for $4.00; in today’s dollars, it would cost $37.00
Maya Angelou’s Singing and Swinging was published in 1976 for $8.95; in today’s dollars that would be $42.34
My copy of Dreamer was published in 1998 for $23; today, that would be $42.47
My copy of The Road was published in 2006 for $24; today that would be $31.80.
For comparison, here are the prices of the current top three New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers:
The President’s Daughter—$27
The Maidens — $27.99
The Last Thing He Told Me—$27.00
(Update: the current (July 2024) going price for a New York Times bestselling hardcover fiction title in July 2024 is $30, a steep increase from three years ago when I first published this, but still below what it would be if prices had kept up with inflation)
Why have prices for books failed to keep up with inflation? There are many factors. Amazon is one, but 100%, absolutely, utterly NOT the only, or even the main one, as the deflation started before Amazon did. I contend that Amazon takes up far too much space in discussions of publishing; this is not to diminish its nefarious power, but to point out that constantly blaming Amazon for problems in the industry distracts us from considering other factors: increasing conglomeration, which forces prices down; pressure from distributors to keep prices down; pressure from booksellers to keep prices down, competition from other forms of entertainment. (And I’m not even considering here the more-than-doubling increased cost of paper, which means the real cost of printing books has squeezed margins even further.)
It’s sucky position to argue that you, individual Americans who support indie booksellers and literary culture by buying books with your increasingly scarce discretionary incomes, should be paying more. But one could also make the argument that if you, individual American who values a variety of books, ones that entertain and ones that inform, ones that formally befuddle and ones that soothe, might also see the correlation between depressed prices and homogeneity and decide to use your dollars to help spur a more vital literary culture.
Imagine what independent presses could accomplish if we could sell our hardbacks for $42—pricing them as Scribner did Johnson’s The Dreamer—instead of, say, $26, which sales reps may still tell us is too high, and is still lower than the Big Five bestsellers.
Perhaps we could, like almost every other maker of consumer items in this country, simply let retailers decide what price to put on our books. We would set a wholesale price, and retailers could price it as they wanted from there. But no. Books—alone amongst consumer goods in the US!— have their prices printed on them. Look around you; do you see anything else you have bought with a permanent price tag on it? A barcode with the price encoded? (Here’s a great rundown on this longstanding—and dumb!— practice). If more of us stopped putting prices on barcodes, booksellers could choose how much to charge for them, discounting those they wanted to offload, increasing the price of those they think would still sell. And consumers could do more comparison shopping, reducing the power of Amazon to discount more than anyone else.
Independent presses, who don’t have the volume that corporate publishing has, and thus for whom these low prices disproportionately hurt, should keep pushing prices upwards while keeping those prices off barcodes, so independent bookstores can be flexible about what they charge. And let us not forget the glorious existence of libraries: all hail this ingenious system which allows anyone to read any book for no money at all while simultaneously keeping publishers part of a market transaction they depend upon.