No, Books Are Not Remotely Too Expensive
Let’s Explore a Little Math
If you wanted Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird back when it first released in the summer of 1960, a hardcover copy would have set you back $3.95. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring came out a few years before; Houghton Mifflin didn’t print the price on the jacket until 1961, but when they finally did, the flap asked potential buyers to part with five whole dollars.
Meanwhile, the current price of a hardcover book? They commonly run around $28, $30, or higher. The price for The Idea Machine is $34.95 (naturally, a steal at any price).
It’s crazy how the prices of books have gone up, and it’s impossible to avoid people complaining about the hikes, whether in discussion forums, social media, or other publications. “We’re in a book affordability crisis,” Book Riot announced in October, and memes like this one, recently posted on X, garner millions of views.
But this is hogwash. Let’s all just breathe into a paper bag and do a little math, starting with nominal prices.
To Inflate a Mockingbird
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.
But, of course, they’re nowhere near so high. I’ve got a hardcover of To Kill a Mockingbird right here by my elbow printed in 2023. Cover price? $27.99. So, while the nominal cost of books has gone up, factoring inflation, it’s nowhere near as high as we should expect. In fact, while not immune, books have been remarkably resistant to inflation.
Along with countless other goods and services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the cost of “recreational books” year over year as part of the Consumer Price Index. And guess what? $20 worth of books in 1997 would cost you a skosh less today: $19.49. “Recreational books experienced an average inflation rate of -0.09% per year,” reports the CPI Inflation Counter website.
Now compare that to housing, healthcare, or admission to sporting events, movies, and concerts—all of which have actually trended higher than general inflation. In the adjoining chart, books represent the only flat line.
Say this, repeat this, consider getting it tattooed:
Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.
Meanwhile, books are trying their darnedest to save you money. If they were tracking upward with inflation, as mentioned, your Harper Lee and hobbits would be $43 and $54. Instead, they’re 30–40 percent cheaper than we would expect them to be.
By that reckoning, books are dirt cheap. That’s not to say there aren’t upward pressures on price. I have personally participated in giving them a goose—and with good reason.
‘Leaving Money on the Table’
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 spent over a decade at Thomas Nelson Publishers. While most of the books I worked on for the first half of my tenure were general-market titles, primarily politics and public affairs, the majority of books published by the larger company were religious, and the religious market liked books a little cheaper than the general market; hardbacks ran, I’d say, at least 10–20 percent lower than their secular counterparts, which put me in a funny situation.
Regnery, one of my primary competitors, also published conservative political titles. This was 2005, 2006, 2007, and they stamped every book they published $27.95, minimum. Meanwhile, I had to fight my own sales team behind the building with bats, blades, and chains to get the number higher than $24.99.
The pressure for low prices created a real disadvantage in the acquisitions process. Every book I wanted to acquire required a profit-and-loss projection, and the cover price was a key lever. A higher cover price meant higher projected revenue, which meant I could justify a larger advance to win the deal. “You’re leaving money on the table!” I’d tell my sales team, trying to budge them from $22.99 to $24.99.
Those two dollars would make a difference, though not as much as you’d think since retailers take roughly half the cover price; the publisher only pockets a dollar of the increase. But, still, a dollar per unit adds up fast if the book sells 15,000, 20,000, 30,000 copies. Smear that effect over the entire catalog and it’s enough to get interesting.
I bring up this angle to nod at a hundred more and save the reader the rigmarole of working through each. Let me just say it this way. The costs of production are legion: author advance, price of paper, cost of printing and binding, freight and warehousing, editorial fees (developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading—often three or four different people), cover design, interior layout and typesetting, indexing, rights and permissions for quoted material, sales commissions, marketing and publicity, co-op fees to retailers for shelf placement, not to mention the returns system, which allows bookstores to boomerang unsold inventory for full credit back on the publisher, leaving the publisher with nary a dime for their trouble.
All of that—and more—has to squeeze inside that little number on the cover.
What’s wild is that, given the upward cost pressure of almost every line item on the list, the price of books stays well below the price of inflation. In any given year a journalist can look at prices and moan like someone stole their lunch. But when you survey the last few decades, you realize we’ve been eating on the cheap for a long time, mostly because publishers are highly reluctant to raise prices, despite the squeeze they feel from every cost center lobbing invoices across the transom.
Who Makes the Money?
Nobody, really. The only people who go into publishing dreaming of big dollars are those who also believe in the Easter Bunny. Just look at EBITDA—Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. Taken as a percentage of revenue, EBITDA serves as a standard profit metric across companies and industries.
We can use the dataset compiled by Aswath Damodaran of NYU Stern School of Business to compare publishing with other sorts of businesses. Start with Green and Renewable Energy—very profitable at 58.45 percent EBITDA. Nice work if you can get it. There’s also:
Oil and Gas (Production and Exploration): 43.21 percent
Semiconductors: 36.77 percent
Software (System and Application): 35.93 percent
Pharmaceuticals: 33.59 percent
Alcoholic Beverages: 29.52 percent
Real Estate (Development): 24.95 percent
Healthcare Products: 20.34 percent
Machinery: 19.62 percent
Construction Supplies: 19.46 percent
Food Processing: 15.25 percent
Advertising: 14.06 percent
And publishing where they’re gouging everyone, jacking prices like pirates and extortionists? Publishing is down around 13.18 percent, three points below the total market EBITDA average of 16.56 percent.
The numbers I’ve seen for publishing usually range from 5 to 15 percent, depending on the year. For reference, grocery stores run about 5 percent. So even at the upper end of the spread, publishing is much closer to Kroger than to Pfizer or Salesforce. The only people publishers are gouging are themselves.
When you hear people say books cost too much money and demand that publishers cut their prices, where are they supposed to cut it from? Some years the only reason publishers are profitable at all is because of layoffs and other creative restructuring—a recurring risk when you run that lean to begin with. Grocery stores can afford to play close to the line because everyone needs groceries every week. But when the market’s wobbly, it’s very easy to put off buying a book. If buyers get frugal a couple months in a row, suddenly the publisher is in the red.
Can’t Have It Both Ways
Bookstores have been having a good run the last several years, and they’re positioned to continue the trend. It’s worth saying they didn’t get there by discounting books. They got there by adding value to their customers who prefer what they have to offer instead of the 20 or 30 percent they’d save on Amazon.
In fact, some indie booksellers are dogmatic about higher price books. They know what keeps their doors open. If the Raven in Lawrence, Kansas, discounted like Amazon, the owner calculates they could stay open less than a week before their costs outran their revenue.
If you want a thriving retail market—not to mention the wider publishing and literary ecosystem—it’s worth recognizing that cheaper books undercut the whole notion:
reduced pay and perks for bookstore staff (health insurance? don’t be silly);
reduced salary for editors (and fewer of them), which means poorly edited books;
reduced financial wherewithal to start and maintain families while working for literary enterprises;
reduced advances and royalties for authors, the vast majority of whom already can’t support themselves on their writing alone;
reduced EBITDA for publishers, which jeopardizes their entire enterprise.
Cheaper books mean more than paying less for books you love; they mean fewer books, worse books, and fewer people able to make a living producing them.
The next time you pick up a $30 hardcover and wince, remember you’re holding a year (probably more) of someone’s creative labor; multiple rounds of professional editing; original cover art and interior design; paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping; a bookseller’s rent; a clerk’s wages; not to mention an entire supply chain from forest to shelf.
What’s more, you get all of this distilled into an object that supplies you with ten to twenty hours of the most immersive form of entertainment humans have ever invented. And did I mention that you own it forever?
Books aren’t remotely too expensive. In real dollars, they’re cheaper right now than when John F. Kennedy was president. Everything else got more expensive, true, but books didn’t. We’re just so used to the bargain we forgot it was one.
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Beautiful. Thanks for this in-depth run down of the book biz. It’s hard out there for book slingers and most consumers don’t understand that.
Yes to all of this!