Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Are books too expensive 2?

This question I posed a couple of days ago which was described by one of our most polite commentators as stupid has generated quite an amount of correspondence.

One argument is that price should be linked to value. Am I getting enough out of the hours spent reading the book. That would suggest that short books should (all other things being equal be more expensive than long ones. There are of course those who think that fat books are good value and there are many retailers who encourage 'bulking out' of novels.

Another argument is that people think books are too expensive because British publishers are money-grabbing idiots who love dishing out huge discounts to some retailers who then discount. I don't understand the argument because the issue I was trying to address is universal, not just British and not related to pricing in supermarkets versus independent stores. And discounts granted to retailers (incidentally) is only one factor in the business relationship between publisher and retailer. Other factors such as the cost of servicing, freight, speed and ease of payment, returns rates, author support also weigh heavily in publishers' commercial thinking.

One commentator thought I was out of touch suggesting £7.99 was a typical price for paperbacks. He cited some Penguin classics at higher price. I could quote back many many classics at £1 - give us a break!

Then there is the argument about whether prices should be printed on covers. And I don't want to get involved in that debate but it does seem a rather trivial matter for our industry compared with the threats of competing media, changing social behaviour and challenges to copyright.

And finally a question about the pricing of textbooks where the US market has seen significant price inflation which is then exported. It's hard to argue against the idea that students find paying $100 for a book difficult. The problem has arisen, in my view, because college textbooks have become over-engineered (rather like American cars of the 1950s and 1960s). Too much colour, too much ancillary material, too long, too slow to market. Perhaps the answer is a return to shorter less flashy textbooks geared to specific courses and being revised annually.

But to finish on a positive note Book Marketing's latest update reports research that shows that for adults in the UK reading is an important activity for 79% and more popular than sex (69%), watching TV (67%), gardening (49%) and computer games (15%). Or the interviewees could have been lying.

And while browsing this excellent document I couldn't help noticing another statistic which confirms the views of most of my female and many of my male colleagues. On average men manage to take out 41.5 hours a week from their busy schedules to enjoy themselves whereas women only manage 23 hours. No comment needed.

I have just spent £8 on two replacement heads for my electric toothbrush. How does that compare to a 400-page book?

#    |  Comments [11]  | 
7/25/2006 10:06:24 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Richard I have no interest in comparing toothbrush prices from the 1960's and 1970's with today because I have *never* sold pharmaceutical products however as a bookshop proprietor I yesterday raised these 3 random (equivalent quality) examples

Nevil Shute "Beyond the Black Stump" Pan, 1972 cover price 30 pence
reprint scheduled of 2000 printing by House of Stratus...price £6.99

C S Forester "The Ship" Penguin, 1960, 2/6 (12 1/2 pence in funny money)
reprint scheduled for Oct 2006 by Penguin....price £7.99

Laurie Lee "Rose for Winter : Travels in Andalucia" Penguin, 1976, 50 pence
Published in 2003 by Vintage.....£6.99 (OOP publisher)

("Quality printing") paperback cover prices in this country (UK) nowadays are "expensive" when compared to 1960's and 1970's printings.

Oh yes I should perhaps have mentioned in 1970 *all* bookshops received 35% Net Book Agreement discount, nett cash 30 days ; nowadays Tesco demand and receive 68%, plus extended payment terms
Clive Keeble
7/25/2006 1:27:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Clive

Why are you so grumpy? I'm sorry you're not interested in toothbrush heads. It was only an aside. In future I'll remeber never to be flippant in case it offends you.

As to book inflation it all depends which books and what starting date you choose. Over the last few years there has been price deflation in the UK in spite of above inflation increases in, for instance, distribution costs (fuel charges etc)and much reduced lines per order profile for most retailers. The other factors in the books you mention is surely also to do with print run size. I'm certain that those books sold substantially more copies in the 70s than now simply because they were fresher then than now. Laurie Lee was still alive and Nevil Shute (died 1960) was still a hot property. I think the three books you mention are still great but I can understand why they don't sell in huge quantities - which naturally pushes up print costs ahead of inflation.
As to the terms, I'm pretty sure that even back in 1972 WHS received better terms than a small independent bookseller - and why not?
richard charkin
7/25/2006 2:21:18 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Richard,

Since I am known as Mr Grumpy in the trade, with a similar store mascot, it is only to be expected that some of my thoughts are grumpy !!

On a lighter note, I felt that you chose the wrong format : the paperback market, both fiction and non-fiction, is strewn with disasters.

I see fantastic value in some niche market publications, especially in quality illustrated titles by independent publishers who maintain a strong backlist which is not chopped or remaindered (Frances Lincoln would be an excellent example). Bookshops can "lay-down" such titles without fear of seeing them devalued and offered at CIANA

Incidentally, compare the current prices of Everyman and the equivalent title in (quality) paperback. Oxford World Classics p/b are generally at least £1 cheaper than the equivalent Penguin, and Penguin Modern Classics (in some instances) quite outrageously priced.

(Experience has taught me that the titles which are always in strongest demand in a new printing are those which are less commonly found secondhand. Anthony Trollope would be a fine example, but that is quite another matter)

There is most certainly value in books, but I believe that bookdealers and their customers have to scour the listings to find the genuine examples. It's a question, in an old fashioned way, of knowing one's trade, and as a base the dealer discount is rather meaningless if the title only has a six-week shelf life.
Clive Keeble
7/26/2006 4:55:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
In an idle moment, I did a breakdown of a 7.99 book I published and the costs and profits. I hope it might be of interest. It is accurate.
RETAIL COST OF BOOK 7.99
AVERAGE discount of 45% 3.59 ( I.e. between 35% and 60%)= 4.40 remains

Author`s royalty 10% 79p = 3.61 remains
Cost of postage averages out at 1.00 per book = 2.61 remains

Cost of production ( printing, typesetting, page design, cover design, proof reading..) 2.13. remains
Leaving me with a profit per book of 48p


SUSAN HILL
7/26/2006 5:19:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Susan

You've left at least one cost out of the calculation - interest. This usually comes out at about 2.5% of sales thus reducing your profit to about 39p. Have you also factored in the cost of unsold copies - review, unsellable returns, overstocks. I reckon you are probably making 30p a copy in real terms, an adequate but not exceptionally profitable title!
Richard Charkin
7/26/2006 7:55:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Books are wonderful value and incredibly cheap. Writing has become almost as cheap as talking.

Nor can one see that changing because competition is so intense and market entry is so cheap. I think the distinction between a book written directly onto the internet and published from there as a bound edition; and a book genuinely accepted by a third party and perhaps edited a bit, is enormously important. The value of the publisher as that third party as someone who decides and discriminates is very high, at the moment anyhow, but I don't see that they (particularly the editors) get paid a fair price for doing that.

Remember when you talk of the "discount to the retailer" an enormous part of that money goes to the landlord of the retailer's property. It was because retailers moved to more expensive locations that discounts rose- not because retailer profits rose. Web booksellers, of course, do not have to pay landlords, and that is why the market is going through such a major correction at the moment (Borders, Waterstone's Ottakars, WHS, Barnes and Noble, everybody) It is very dramatic, but the driving force is property values and the ability of web retailers to avoid them.
Tim Coates
7/26/2006 9:23:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I`m sure you`re right Richard, you`ve been a publisher a lot longer than me. But that is on a sale of almost 2,000 copies. In order to get into a profit of up to £1 a copy I have to sell a good many more and a lot of those have to be sold direct - cutting out the middle man. Which won`t please all the middlemen we know.
But I published a book by Debo Devonshire 6 years ago - hardback 9.99. It has sold almost 60,000, and several thousand of those go in one shipment to the same outlet. That`s when you start making a sensible profit. I get very very few returns infact - just one book which I published, almost all the rather large sales of which came back after Christmas. Set me back 2 years.
SUSAN HILL
7/27/2006 5:19:44 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Yes, but how many titles (out of the 100,000 plus ayear in the UK) sell 60,ooo plus copes? I can't be bothered to check but it's certainly fewer than 1000 (perhaps even fewer than 100). This means that the chances of a decent profit on a book are worse than 100-1. Hardly a recipe for the creation of 'fat-cat' publishers which seems to be the theme of some of the commentators!
Richard Charkin
7/27/2006 11:38:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
this is partly publishers' own faults because they have always refused to make true figures public...so of course everyone thinks they are fat cats. And it only takes 1 Dan Brown/Harry Potter to make you a pretty fat cat ! Dream on..
SUSAN HILL
7/28/2006 1:52:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Then don't print every book you publish. Make them available electronically, and keep track of which ones get a respectable number of downloads. Those are the ones you have printed.

You need to remember that your job is to sell books, not stroke delicate egos.
Alan Kellogg
7/29/2006 4:08:20 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Actually our job isn't to sell books. By and large that's the job of booksellers. Our job is to edit and support authors, to promote, to distribute as widely as possible and to collect money on behalf of our authors. Some of the money comes from booksellers, some comes from other sources - licensing rights, translations, serialisation etc. Stroking delicate egos is definitely part of the job.

Print on demand is indeed a good solution to some of the issues but not all - an dit brings with it a set of issues of its own - to do with the defnition of out of print etc.
Richard Charkin