HowTaoBrownCow wrote:
[*]The cost of the whole thing varies widely. On the one end, you have tiny children's books, or books that aren't much more than pamphlets like The Master Cleanser (aka the lemonade diet), through novellas like DeLint's Dingo, up through massive tomes like A Team of Rivals (the book on the Lincoln Presidency).
The cost of manufacturing books is still MUCH lower than the retail thing though (like everything really). And really the size only affects selling price points in things like A Team of Rivals. The Master Cleanser diet is a ridiculously small little thing, but it still retails for like 15 bucks.
And the WORST offenders of this are storybooks for children, you're looking at like 20 pages for the longer ones and again around 15 bucks per book for most of them. If not more than that because they're unnecessarily oversized or something.
It doesn't cost them anywhere near 15 dollars to make those things, especially once you eliminate physical aspects like oversized pages and the fact that they're "hardcovers". For some books, honestly (and this is as someone who doesn't even buy books from his work with a 30% discount because they're too expensive) 14 dollars is a legitimate price. For MOST books, like 95% 14 dollars is absolutely ridiculous.
