The Price of Books: A Word to Book Reviewers

Abstract

Two common fallacies that find their way into book reviews are that a new book would sell many more copies if it were less expensive, and that a new book could or should be less expensive than it is priced. The first of these fallacies is based on a mistaken idea of the relation between the price and the sales of a book. When a publisher undertakes to publish a book, one of his first and most difficult tasks is to estimate the sales of the book. Once this estimate has been made, the publisher will decide how many copies of the book to print. He will then, in accordance with the size of the printing and the cost of production, assign a retail price to the book. For each book there is a certain market. And although this market can be reached, it cannot be expanded indefinitely. (This is why advertising directed to the general public does not, by itself, sell books.) If a prospective buyer is not interested in a book, he will not buy it, no matter how low it may be priced. If he is interested, he will be influenced by the price of the book, but not so much as one might expect. A slightly lower price does not lead to greatly increased sales of a book. Only a substantially lower price will increase sales, and this lower price is normally made possible only by a larger printing of the book, in the expectation of selling it. The most familiar example of this occurs when a book is reprinted in paperback form. It is not the paper covers, but the large printing, which accounts for the low price of paperbacks. From the publisher's point of view, the paperback reprint of a book is a very different proposition from the original book. The initial high costs of production and promotion were spent when the book was first published, and the chief risk has already been taken. This brings us to the second fallacy-that a new book could or should be less expensive than it is priced. On the contrary, the cost of producing and distributing new books (as opposed to reprints) is so high that it commonly leaves little or no profit for the publisher. If a book has been costly to produce, it must bear a high price. The book may contain a large number of music examples, which required expensive blocks; it may include expensive plates; it may have presented special problems of typography; it may have been printed on high-quality, expensive paper.