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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
All of this adds up, but if the high price of hardcovers may be more than some consumers want to pay, it's not a recent development. When the prices of hardcover books are adjusted for inflation, they turn out to have remained fairly flat between 1975 and 2000.
Nonetheless, for those who remember the 1970s, the escalation in prices does appear substantial. Figures obtained from R.R. Bowker, the company of record for information about the publishing industry, show that, from 1975 to 2000, the price of the average hardcover book of fiction went up 200 percent to $24.96. Average prices for hardcover poetry and drama books increased 211 percent to $33.57. Nonfiction hardcovers went up 123 percent to $40.29. The largest increase was in the juvenile category, which climbed 227 percent to arrive at the current average of $18.40.
Still, adjust these figures for inflation and you get a different story, says Robert Sahr, an associate professor of political science at Oregon State University who studies media coverage of complex matters such as budgeting and economic policies. He found that the cost of hardcover fiction in real dollars had actually gone down 2 percent, while poetry and drama and juvenile categories had risen only a few percentage points. Nonfiction hardcovers had decreased in real price by 27 percent.
"I'm not very surprised," Sahr says. "Trade books are one of the clearest examples of a completely discretionary purchase. They have to be price-sensitive."
But that's not to say that hardcover prices weren't already too expensive in 1975. And while the price for front-list hardcovers has remained relatively static, some of consumers' overall exasperation with the cost of books may derive from very real increases in the prices of paperbacks -- both mass-market "supermarket" books and trade paperback editions of backlist titles (books originally published some years ago). These are the majority of books sold.
According to Bowker, the average price for mass-market paperback fiction has gone up a whopping 328 percent (from $1.35 in 1975 to $5.78 in 2000), poetry and drama have increased by 252 percent, and juvenile titles cost a staggering 387 percent more now than they did in 1975. (No figures were available for nonfiction mass-market paperbacks.) Adjusting for inflation, Sahr found that the average price of mass-market paperbacks has gone up almost 40 percent, poetry and drama almost 15 percent, and juvenile titles just under 60 percent.
But what's taken a huge bite out of America's book budget is the rise of the trade paperback, those larger paperbacks of better quality that can now be found occupying prime real estate on tables at the front of bookstores. Since the 1980s, publishers have increasingly kept their backlist in trade paperback, and used this format to publish the paperback versions of books that don't have a mass-market appeal or million-copy sales potential, such as more-literary or specialized titles. Right now the price of most trade paperbacks hovers between $12 and $16, although nonfiction titles often cost more. (For example, this week's No. 1 New York Times bestseller, "John Adams," by David McCullough, costs $18.95, which makes you wonder how soon trade paperbacks will begin to regularly creep past the $20 barrier.)
While trade paperbacks are more presentable and easier to read than mass-market paperbacks, they have in many cases supplanted those less expensive books. For example, in the '60s, you could pick up a copy of John Updike's "Rabbit, Run," for as little as 65 cents in mass-market paperback, which when converted to 2002 dollars roughly equals $4. A 1991 mass-market paperback of the same book went for $5.99, which in today's dollars is roughly $8. Today, a new "Rabbit, Run" paperback is only available in trade paperback and goes for $14.
The practice of selling at a discount has also fueled the rising price of books. Over the past two decades, widespread discounting has made it seem as if consumers are getting a deal. Some superstores discount books on the New York Times bestseller list and other selected titles. At online venues, the savings often extend to other hardcovers and trade paperbacks. For example, the "Rabbit, Run" trade paperback sells for only $11.20 on Amazon because the site offers a 20 percent discount. To compete with larger outlets, independent booksellers have initiated "frequent buyer" programs in which a certain amount in purchases entitles a customer to discounts.
Everyone likes to feel he or she is getting a bargain, but discounting has made it easier for book prices to creep upward while maintaining the illusion that consumers are getting the books inexpensively. Since booksellers' markups aren't as big as those of other retailers, discounting can be a risky strategy that slices profit margins razor thin; recently, some have thought better of it. After growing accustomed to the sight of 20- and 30-percent-off stickers, suddenly consumers are being charged full price for many types of books, another source of sticker shock. Maintaining the illusion that books are affordable has gotten more difficult.
