How much should books cost?
Well, how much should publishing cost?
For those of us in academic or academic-adjacent circles, the first weekend in January means a social-media feed dominated by conference-goers. It’s when historians, literary scholars, and lots of other groups have their big annual meetings. Anecdotally, attendance is down in 2024, and the exhibits where publishers sell books and meet prospective authors sound smaller.
In this respect among others, I think it’s useful to approach the pandemic as a source of instructive experiments—an event outside publishers’ control that posed useful questions like: What happens to publishers when there’s no conference exhibiting? At the press I was then directing, sales were up in 2020 and 2021, even as public-health considerations meant that traditional investments like conference exhibiting were removed as options. Once things like conference exhibits reopened, it became easier to say “We were able to succeed without the high costs of traipsing around the continent selling discounted books at pop-up events in hotel basements” than if we’d simply announced, absent an external shock, that we were discontinuing a longstanding practice.
And I think for university presses, at least, it’s important to see a lot of the bells and whistles around books as investments in author happiness (people like seeing their books exhibited) as much as, or often more than, sales opportunities. As my colleague Rebecca Colesworthy notes, most presses that exhibit at conferences know they’re losing money on the investment. There are advantages in visibility and author relations and lots else (and before the covid-era gumming-up of air travel, it was sometimes fun for publishing staff to travel and attend). But very few presses sell enough books to recover costs this way. To arrive finally at the subject line for this post, those unrecovered costs can mean a higher sticker price for books.
Printing is another area where pandemic disruptions provided an interesting experiment. As partners like warehouses and printers were forced to close or reduce capacity in deference to public health requirements, fast-and-flexible digital printing became a bigger part of the business. Once a publisher has, for example, set up Amazon to print off books as they’re ordered, it becomes harder to go back to doing large offset print runs that may or may not sell, and that have to be shipped from warehouse to online retailer through an increasingly janky supply chain. While the gap in production values between offset books and books printed digitally is narrowing, the ones from an old-fashioned printer still look better. Is the investment, though, worth it? Should readers pay more for nicer books? In the interest of charging less for books, what can publishing do without?
What I want to suggest is not that book publishers focus exclusively on the bottom line and economize on things like marketing and printing to the point where books are no longer special. Most of us working with books do it from passion. But our decisions are constrained by market forces, and I think an understanding of those forces among book buyers can improve the discourse. While publishers don’t always get these decisions right, they’ll be more open to suggestions that engage cost–benefit analysis than those that blame everything, always, on publishers’ supposed greed.
I’ll close with a link to my colleague
’s provocation—“Books Are Cheap.”