Books are not too expensive | Hacker News Reader

Books are not too expensive

millersbookreview.com

140 pointsherbertl210 comments

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.

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.

Are you sure about that?

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.

Exactly. The article was specifically about mass market paperbacks.

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.

Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.

First, the authors make very little money on most textbooks. You would be shocked. The money is staying with the book publishers.

Second, they've started publishing new editions so quickly with only the problem sets changed (in general) so that students can't use previous editions. If you're learning on your own, you can get some good deals on older editions for just that reason.

And on top of that, they maintain their own platforms so that even if you buy them used, you have to subscribe to a service to take the tests! All of this lines up to finding as many ways to extract money from students and at interest after it's all said and done.

> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.

This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.

It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.

I don't disagree about the complicity. However, biology and statistics, even at intro level, have had significant updates in material covered over the last 10-20 years.

More subtly, terminology changes. My copy of Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis is just as correct now as it was when it was published in 1976, but I remember one of my professors describing the terminology as somewhat dated, as of the late 2000s.

They aren't complicit when the cheap edition isn't reprinted and instead it's "2nd, 3rd, revised" etc.

Universities could band together and write and publish their own textbooks. These days they don't even need to print them.

The 'textbook cartel' plays the same role for authors as Ticketmaster plays for artists: they're the bad guy so that artists can charge more.

The considerate professors would use titles from Dover Books with supplemental reading:

https://store.doverpublications.com/pages/math-science

On the order of $10 each - small paperbacks.

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.

where did you study? and is it still like that?

Newcastle University, and yeah, at least 2 years ago it was still true.

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.

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've found some wonderful books at estate sales. A poet's annotated books of poetry, for example.

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.

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.

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.

> It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool.

Responding to the dead child comment: that's what common paperbacks are for. Don't don't mess up a nice hardcover or anything rare.

Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

> Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

I'm not being black and white like that. Some books "are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out" others should be treated with more care.

For an extreme example: if somehow you come to possess the Book of Kells, don't go scribbling your brain farts all over it. You're a modern person who can easily buy paper or a notebook to hold such things.

Growing up, I couldn’t afford new books for school all the time. Ended up thrifting a lot of them. Annotations were like a mixed bag of candy. Sometimes they were your favorite flavor and sometimes they would give you brain aneurysms. Unfortunately that experience makes me treat books as precious objects.

I cringe watching my daughter dogear her books. It hurts me deep in my soul to see her nice books damaged that way.

But objectively my reaction is wrong. Books are not mystical objects to be revered. They are objects to be used. Nearly all books end up in a landfill or recycled eventually. What does it actually matter if they end up there covered in annotations and filled with dog eared pages?

Books you have borrowed? Absolutely do not write in them or dogear pages. Books you intend to share with others? Generally the same. Rare books or valuable books? Of course. Normal books you got on Amazon or from your local bookstore that you use only for your personal enjoyment? Use them how you want.

AFAICT, publishers don't donate books to public libraries. Those public libraries use our taxes to buy books.

So if books are expensive then our taxes buy fewer books.

San Francisco public libraries spend $200m per year, of which 15% is spent on 'collections', including books, ebooks, magazines etc.

That's $35 per resident. The denominator includes newborns, infants and others that can't read or don't like to read.

Libraries also do a lot more than just provide books. $35 per resident per year for everything that libraries do provide is forking cheap, and we would be greatly impoverished if they were to disappear.

The $35 is just the 15% spent on collections.

The total is $235 per resident per year.

But my point above wasn't about whether that number is high or low. It's that the price of books is paid by us, even it's funneled through taxes and librarians.

Unless I am misreading the GP, that is $35 per resident on purchasing books. The amount for everything would be $233 per resident.

>That's $35 per resident.

Seems like good value to me.

That's the amount spent on books etc., not the total library budget.

What do you think is the mean number of library books read by a San Francisco resident per year?

San Francisco Public Library [0] is the best resource for readers in California. Of all the libraries in the state, I've found they are the most likely to acquire new titles, and often they are the only holder if the subject is particularly niche and technical. Even most university libraries are switching to digital collections *which can't be loaned out*.

One reason I say SFPL is great for all^H^H^H many Californians+ is their book collection is available for free pickup at a your local library via the inter-library sharing program, Link+ [1].

((People, submit purchase requests at your local libraries. It's what it's for.))

The other is that they are subscribers to "O'Reilly for Public Libraries", which lets people access Everything from O'Reilly for Free [2].

[0]: https://sfpl.org/

[1]: https://linkencore.iii.com/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOsOTawdWFc

My point was not whether $35/year per person on books is a lot or a little. I was responding to a comment where someone suggested libraries were a way to avoid high book prices. But they're not!

Libraries themselves (and by extension, taxpayers) suffer from high book prices.

Separately, would you mind explaining this part, as I'm not familiar with university libraries: "Even most university libraries are switching to digital collections which can't be loaned out."

Does this mean you can only read the digital collections when physically present in the library, or that they're only available to members and not via inter-library loan?

A few years ago I suggested a book via this form: https://sfpl.org/services/ask-librarian/suggest-title I never received any response.

I've since (very recently) learned there's another way to suggest titles here: https://sfpl.bibliocommons.com/user_dashboard#overlay456

Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.

> I was responding to a comment where someone suggested libraries were a way to avoid high book prices. But they're not!

Most of the books I've bought got read by me, and then sit on a shelf forever. If a book is bought by a library, and used multiple times before it's weeded, that's a big win for $/read.

> Just now, I went to suggest a book there and got a popup message saying they won't get that book because it's over 10 years old. It's a book about critical thinking. It doesn't need to be updated.

I think the library is suggesting a 10 year old book might be better accessed through other means. Can you get it from interlibrary loan? Is it available on the used market? It may not be available through the library's usual sourcing, etc.

Why would the age of the book matter? If it were from a big publisher and they were to publish a new substantially-unchanged edition every three years, why would that make the library willing to consider the book?

The book in question is still in print and still available new.

If nobody wanted it in the first 10 years it was available, chances are it's only going to get one circulation if they buy it for you. That's not a great use of the libraries purchase budget or shelf space budget.

If they had a copy that wore out and it was circulated many times, they would have reordered it when they discarded it.

That's why it's great that SFPL purchases such a wide variety of books. You can't ILL something if nobody has it.

When I was a teen I got my local library to acquire copies of a number of tech classics:

SICP, K&R, Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated, ANSI CL, ... all discarded to my everlasting disappointment.

Books like these approach $100 new. That's a lot of money for someone in high school.

SFPL doesn't have even one copy of SICP.

And I can't request a copy because it's too old.

I can't remember the number of times and ways I've tried to get them to re-acquire it. Maybe we should organize a good old sit-in?

https://mtpfriends.bigcartel.com/product/what-s-more-punk-ad...

Some universities have it, but the only copy in CA public libraries seems to be at the Sharp Park branch in Pacifica (which I believe was acquired in the last couple of years - good on them!).

Berkeley public library has copies of the JS edition for what that's worth..

I would prefer my library not buy SICP (at least the Scheme edition) since it's available for free online.

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

Yes. It's important to leave room on the shelf for yet another copy of the next edition of Computers for Seniors for Dummies:

https://linkencore.iii.com/iii/encore/record/C__Rb51571246__...

btw, Andres Raba brought us the preferred online edition of SICP:

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/

Also, I'd like to note that in my experience no public library can provision online-only books. I've been unable to get any to acquire Mastering Emacs for example.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/

the JavaScript edition:

https://sicp.sourceacademy.org/

What do you mean 'no one wanted it'?

Most library users select from the books on the shelf.

That's like saying you shouldn't write a book because no one wanted it in the past, before it existed.

Nobody requested it => no one wanted it.

If that's the case, then why do librarians curate collections? Why stock any book before a library user has requested it?

To reduce latency on first use for books the curators think are likely to be used?

As the top poster said: Use it or lose it.

Request physical copies of books you want to read, and that you think are beneficial to the community. And check them out from time to time.

I'm sure a librarian does their best to keep abreast with the latest best books.. but would they know the field better than someone in it?

I've been told they have experts that consult on title selection. But based on the 004-006 section at most libraries, I can only infer that is the IT guy at the senior center..

If the library buys it, that patron will come..

SFPL doesn't have even one copy of SICP.

And I can't request a copy because it's too old.

Do you believe that no one in San Francisco ever wanted to read SICP?

I can believe that nobody was checking it out and it got weeded. But you should be able to get it through interlibrary loan.

https://sfpl.libanswers.com/faq/97320

Worldcat says it's at 1483 libraries: https://search.worldcat.org/title/Structure-and-interpretati... (although some of them may not participate in ILL, and some may only have eBooks that you probably can't borrow unless you have an appropriate account)

I'm sure SFPL does tracking on ILL requests and if something comes up more than once or twice in a reasonable period and it's available for purchase, a copy will be purchased to add to the collection.

OK I just submitted two ILL requests (for two different books).

Yes. I've found criteria for new books at public libraries to be very limiting. They usually will only acquire newly published books (published within a year or so). But they do get a discount from the publisher, perhaps 30%.

Basically, they will buy books that nobody's had a chance to review yet or talk about, but won't buy books published a year ago that everyone cites and recommends. It's a broken policy.

I'd say it is a way to avoid the high cost of books tho, in that they are a shared resource. Dozens of people may check out a single copy within a year. E-books at public libraries are more accessible, but only a finite number of copies may be accessed by patrons at a time - less accessible than you might think. Additionally, e-books are not owned, but leased. And the cost is substantial and comparable to the cost of a physical copy, and re-paid every few years.

Another way libraries avoid the cost of new books is by relying on other libraries to expand their collection. When my local library joined LINK+, for instance, they substantially decreased the amount of new books they would acquire, and it's stripping influence from the individual patron. Good luck borrowing a copy of Laws of Software Engineering [0] anywhere. Or Crafting Interpreters [1].

As far as university collections go, most have large libraries with huge collections that are available to borrow - somehow. But most of the books are very old. The new acquisitions are primarily digital and may only be accessed through a locked terminal or web portal. Whether the general public has access varies and often costs quite a bit or is free for the immediate community.

Here is info on borrowing at a few:

https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/find/borrow-renew

($100/yr for CA residents, limited access to the library, no remote access)

https://library.claremont.edu/borrowing/

(limited to nearby county residents, but free. no remote access or ebooks)

https://library.stanford.edu/about-stanford-libraries/visito...

(range of options: $1000/yr to $35/two-weeks, remote unclear)

I have had some luck accessing some e-books at some colleges, but for the most part you need to have a login. It really depends on their policies and licensing deals with digital publishers.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47847179

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950235

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.

⸻

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.

My issue with borrowing books was the logistics of it. Showing up, borrowing, returning on time, remembering to return. I'd rather own. Plus, I really like Kindle. It eliminates the largest annoyance I had with books - keeping them open while reading. It introduced an annoyance of its own though; it has to be charged. Once a week or two. So not that bad.

You can borrow ebooks via Libby to your Kindle.

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.

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.

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?

Calibre (though this is not so simple with Amazon ebooks since they disabled downloading books to your PC)

Amazon did re-enable downloads for books without DRM, in the same place in the Content Library. Not as good as it was before, but better than nothing.

> (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.

>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%.

To be fair though, a lot of publishers also do a one time payment deal with authors as well, after achieving a certain milestone of number of books sold.

The more common is an advance payment, but note that these are almost always offset against royalties, not in addition to royalties, and you need to be fairly successful before you'll ever earn out a full advance.

For 99%+ of authors, writing is a hobby that pays less than minimum wage. For self published authors it's often a net loss after costs like editors and cover design.

I like to pay the author for the marginal cost and then once it's hit a sum that can be transferred I do that. e.g. I estimate about $1E-12 per time I hit Cmd-C and Cmd-V on each book. So far, no author has hit the threshold for me to send them their cent, but I dearly believe "render unto Caesar what is Caesar". It's important we pay authors.

You can strip the DRM fairly easily these days if you have an ACSM file, I vibecoded this the other day after I couldn’t find any online converter that actually worked: https://www.acsm-converter.com

> I see no reason why I should be paying the same (or often more) than the paperback version.

I rarely see the ebooks cost more than print, they're usually slightly cheaper. But the reason they aren't drastically cheaper is that a significant portion of the cost of a book isn't actually in the paper or the printing, it's in paying the author, editors, designers, marketers, etc. All of those people are crucial to the book publishing process, whether it's print or digital or, usually, both.

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.

This is very true in non-fiction, where you can clearly see authors take an idea that should be a long blog post and stretch it out to 150 pages.

The same authors usually have blog posts that should have been tweets.

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.

> 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.

Can you do that with a physical book?

Mu? With a book I’m not bound to a technologically complex device I can’t repair, let alone to somebody’s willingness to maintain a remotely accessible database somewhere on another continent. At worst, I can mount a camera above my desk on a microphone arm and fire up ScanTailor. Even if it’s amazingly tedious work.

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.

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

That's just fetishizing a mass produced object. Books have never been about the physical object, they have always been about what is written.

It's like guys buying fancy cars and motorbikes to polish them in the garage, rather than riding them.

And same thing frankly for vinyl collecting vs digital music files.

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.

Agreed.

I grew up having a lot of books around, mostly non-fiction, mostly from library book sales, garage sales, and used bookstores. There is a magnetic pull to a large well sorted bookcase. Pair it with a comfortable chair free of distractions. The best entertainment to my mind.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Ebooks go on sale a lot. You can often get them for less than $3.00, but it takes effort to track what you like and keep an eye out for sales. The trade off wasn't worth it for me years ago and I paid full price for what I wanted to read... lately there are very few books I pay full price for.

Often I can get a used paperback or sometimes even a used hardcover book cheaper than the ebook.

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?

No, but it is economical to translate into e.g. English, less so to translate into Swedish or Estonian.

Depends on the genre. It wasn't unusual for an acclaimed travelogue by a French or German author to be translated into multiple European languages, but never get an English version because UK and US publishers assume their market just won't buy foreign-penned travel books.

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.)

Bay Area Rapid Transit?

That's right. In today's carriage to San Francisco my very unscientific observation it's: three reading books, thirty on their phones, ten resting with their thoughts.

One of the things that I loved about Paris when I was there a couple of years ago was that everyone on the subway had books out (whether Kindles or paper) -- very few phones in sight.

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

> 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.

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).

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.

Also minus the cost of the unsold copies.

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 tech market books have such a small market and short lifespan that I'm surprised that they can make it at even $70.

If they're good. I'll pay the 70$ for Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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.

> It's space you can't use for anything else, dedicated entirely to objects most people open once or twice and never touch again.

It worth noting that books can be decor. To the point where people who don't read buy them for decoration.

https://booksbythefoot.com is either the most horrible gore site you've ever seen, or interesting.

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 used to use addall.com, but that doesn't capture eBay nor Thriftbooks anymore both of which are always cheaper than youll find from addall results

¿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.

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.

There are tons of price cuts that paperbacks (and especially MMPBs) use that they don't bother with on (most) hardcovers, because if you're getting a hardcover you probably don't care about absolute lowest cost.

And there's stuff much cheaper than MMPB but they're very rare (think phonebooks and old catalogs).

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.

What is the advantage of an ebook reader versus an ordinary Android tablet?

They often have much more "paper like" screens that are not thrashing your eyes with blue light, so they're more comfortable and less "screen like" for reading.

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."

Using the cost to print instead of the full cost of production is very misleading. Someone needs to write, edit, typeset, market, etc. the books.

Most books don't sell a ton of copies, so there usually isn't a lot of profit left over after those costs.

You left out shipping, storing, and logistics.

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?

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.

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-...

Crossing the ocean twice costs less than half a kg of CO2 per kg of book. Rail is almost as efficient and goes smaller distances. The truck portion is probably the biggest factor in shipping but it's still not that much. And it's the part that's hardest to remove from the supply chain.

That's pretty much it, although the US and EU do have local printers and paper sources, so not everything goes through China.

China has become popular in recent years because a number of printers offer special editions - sprayed/deckled edges, high quality hard binding - which authors can sell as high-margin items to genre fiction collectors.

Generally, the print industry is incredibly destructive. In addition to all the shipping, it literally eats forests and uses huge quantities of water.

I will have to check my shelves but I can’t think of a book I read recently that didn’t say printed in China.

Although most of my book purchases have been kids books or textbooks. Maybe that is the reason.

They are not that high cost to produce and they can last which makes them very sustainable. Its common for books to last decades.

Sure, _a book_ might be sustainable in this system but the average book likely is just shipped around a ton and never used in this system.

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.

> the law changed, requiring that taxes be paid on unsold inventory each year, these warehouses became a tax liability

How exactly did the law change? I can see them costing as an expense in the year published and not counted as revenue until sold (that's a "tax advantage") - but having to pay tax each year on inventory? That's more than just removing a tax advantage.

My understanding (I am not an accountant or lawyer and this is not legal advice, but a layman's uncertain organic memory) is that it was just that:

- old law: tax is deferred until item is sold

- new law: tax is owed on property in inventory each year until sold

There were hearings on Congress and Librarians holding marches protesting the bill, but it all seems to have faded away into obscurity and the new status quo.

> - new law: tax is owed on property in inventory each year until sold

This type of "property" tax is very rare except on physical real estate (at least in US) but it might be they did that. If so, it'd destroy the long tail entirely, so much so that I'd think print on demand companies like Amazon were behind the tax bill.

Found it --- from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlist

>In the US, backlist and midlist publications were negatively affected by the US Supreme Court decision in the 1979 case Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. This decision reinterpreted rules for inventory depreciation, changing how book publishers had to account for unsold inventory each year, and their ability to depreciate it. Because stocks of unsold books could no longer be written down without proof of value, it became more efficient tax-wise for companies to simply destroy inventory.

Ah, that's much older than I thought.

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?

> 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.

> 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!

The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.

Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typical example of that good today, without digging into the details, because the typical example today is often a lot worse-made but in ways that aren't apparent just from looking at a wide-shot image of the two things. Often it takes destructive tear-downs to really get at the differences (as it would to do a deep comparison of book binding quality) if you don't have access to watch the manufacturing processes directly.

Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.

(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)

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...

[1]: https://adasbooks.com/

Oh, no! Tragedy! Ada's is closing in June!

https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/capitol-hil...

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.

Its not standard, but its widely used because it is more comparable between companies as it removes the impact of interest (and therefore capital structure) and depreciation (which can reflect different histories).

The standardised measures can be manipulated too.

Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar. But the article applies it across industries, where those assumptions break down. This makes no sense.

The article called it a 'standard profit metric'. It is a metric, but it doesn't measure profit (as it ignores capitalized costs) and it isn't standard.

> Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar.

The whole point of EBITDA is, as I said, to eliminate the effect of capital structures.

EBITDA margin is not meaningful between dissimilar industries. I am not sure what would be best. Some sort of return on investment measure.

I think calling it a profit measure is fine.

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, ... )

With the median daily wage around the world being $12 USD I would say books are definitely expensive; especially when literacy and knowledge are two of the proven ways of pulling people out of poverty.

Not many people have mentioned used books. I bought 4 books for something like $20 the other day. You can't beat that.

Hitting an estate sale and lucking into someone whose tastes run similar to one's own can get a person whole libraries for cents per book. It's the kind of thing a certain kind of reader can dabble at for a few months one lazy year early in life, then stop and never do it again because they've accumulated a lifetime or more of good reading material for the cost of a very-few dinner-n-a-movie evenings.

(This is where many used book stores get the bulk of their stock, aside from, these days, buying out other used book stores that are closing)

I just ordered the new dungeon crawler Carl book.

It’s coming to me for the low, low price of FREE from my local library.

> 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.

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 still fondly remember that time I found a hardback 50% off at £11. The only hardback I've ever bought brand new. At second hand shops, the difference is much less.

Magazines are too expensive now.

About a buck per non-ad page.

pro tip: buy it used on ebay. the good shops offer books for around a dollar and if you buy 3 you get a 4th free.

I find buying books on eBay a much better experience than Amazon (mostly used, but sometimes even new when it's cheaper).

Not too expensive compared to what?

How about those $130 textbooks?

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 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

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.

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.

I would've thought movies and sporting events are a fairly appropriate category for comparison for books.

The only one I'd want sadly is.. https://newandroidbook.com/

Hard disagree.

The article contradicts itself when you verify it.

Tolkien's Fellowship was $7 in 2000 using the given inflation calculator it would be $13 today (not more than $50 as mentioned in the article??? They probably set the date at over 50 years ago) todays edition of the book is $20 (not the $13 it should have been with inflation) and the hardcover version is at $30.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fellowship-of-the-ring-...

> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

Books became more expensive as everything else.

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