As the author becomes more famous, the royalties of the author increase as well. No time for reading? Click here to reveal how to read a whole book in 15 minutes! The problem is that economy of scale works in the opposite direction for books. The number of avid readers is decreasing day by day. That is why; the sale of books is decreasing in terms of copies. With the lower copies being sold, the price of the books is undoubtedly bound to increase.
That is what is happening. Most online, as well as offline bookstores, have a return policy. It means that if you do not want to read the book or do not like the book, you can return the book and get a refund.
However, bookstores have to factor in this return policy loss to make a profit by selling books. That is why; the margins of the retailers need to be increased. It is another factor which increases the cost of books. Physical books need to be stored and need to be transported from one place to another. The logistics costs certainly add up. That is because books need to be transported pretty carefully. One thing which you would have noticed is that ebooks are cheaper as compared to printed books.
There are a few reasons for the same as well. I will share with you these reasons below. Ebooks do not use resources for every copy.
Once the recording is done, unlimited copies can be sold. Similarly, there is no storage cost for ebooks as well. 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. 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. The usual excuse is that it's a very small market. The more specific, the more expensive the science books get. 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. 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.
Yeah the textbooks I've had to buy for university have often set me back pretty substantially. 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. 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. Ebook pricing will improve, but unfortunately people seem perfectly happy with shitty typography, proprietary formats and DRM. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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. Peter Donoughue does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Five years ago, in the midst of the rancorous parallel importation debate the Productivity Commission undertook a thorough examination of book prices in Australia compared to comparable prices in the US and the UK.
Five years later, have things changed? The short answer is yes, very definitely, but it took three to four years to happen. Since the Aussie dollar achieved parity and above with the US dollar in , and the highest rate against the pound in 28 years, most publishers have been shocked into adjusting their pricing practices.
Until around the great majority of Australian-based publishers who imported US and UK titles used formulaic pricing practices way out of kilter with then current exchange rates.
They were not responsive, and with parallel importation restrictions in place, were under no pressure to be responsive, to competitive pressures of any substance. And they hardly ever changed those prices, except upwards, when changed exchange rate realities demanded it.
But it was too late, of course. The consumers had flown. Their ingrained expectation was that, even if the local bookseller had it in stock, the price would be way over the top. I had been preaching and practising for years that there was a golden rule in import pricing that publishers must follow if they wanted to keep faith with the consumer:.
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