Book prices

[Vladd67]

i have recently been trying to track down a copy of Warhammer: Legends of the High Seas. When this book was in print it cost around £15, now, as like all Warhammer Historical rules, it is out of print, I cannot find a copy for less than £65. This is absurd, what idiot pays that sort of money that encourages people to charge so much?

 

[SilentRoamer]

Out of print books have always been the sellers market.

A friend of mine has offered me increasingly large sums of money to get his hands on my God Emperor of Dune 1981 1st/1st

 

[Mark Ragland]

I haven't bought a book in many years. I'm grateful I live so close to a public library.

 

[Brian G Turner]

What astonishes me is the reverse - that when books become immensely popular, they are priced dirt cheap. Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey for only £3.95? Then publishers complain that they're not making any money? Here's a suggestion - price those really popular books the same as every other. Profits = up.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Or eBook pricing.
Unsurprisingly when the "big" publishers raised eBook prices they are selling much less and making less profit. Since there is no print run cost on eBooks you'd think they would price them more opimally, or do they have some bizarre idea that increased eBook sales hurts publishing?

Fifty Shades of Grey for only £3.95?

Yes, but that's driven by supermarket bulk purchase
Obviously they mean "generally" they are losing money (some of the time). The larger the print run, the lower the setup and print costs per book. They can't be making much of a percentage profit at that price, but certainly the volume is there to make the absolute profit, like supermarkets vs a Deli.

OTH eBook pricing is nuts. Less popular titles are £1 approx and popular titles are priced virtually the same as paper, aside from first books of a series / trilogy. The big Publishers will lose out eventually to SP and small publishers if they don't more realistically price.
Also why on earth can't they [big publishers] even hire someone to set up their own eCommerce to compete with Amazon etc in books? It's not rocket science, I could set up a site that works better than Amazon and handles the volume. So it's stupidity and politics. They have the content!

 

[MWagner]

i have recently been trying to track down a copy of Warhammer: Legends of the High Seas. When this book was in print it cost around £15, now, as like all Warhammer Historical rules, it is out of print, I cannot find a copy for less than £65. This is absurd, what idiot pays that sort of money that encourages people to charge so much?

It's a gaming collectible. In the age of the internet and ebay, all it takes is a few people in the world with deep pockets to drive up the price of a scarce collectible. And these days, there are lots of gamers with deep pockets, people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars in high tech and for whom gaming collectibles are what sports cars and motorcycles are to non-gamers.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

In that case £65 might be a bargain!

 

[Vertigo]

The claim has always been that printing and distribution costs are very small compared to all the other publishing costs; editing (all varieties), marketing etc. Having seen the typical quality of self-published editing I can certainly see why they can be sold for £1 - they clearly haven't spent any money (or time) on editing.

 

[tinkerdan]

A copy of my first book was once listed for 100 US dollars, which was ludicrous since was still available at amazon at the time.

But in the case of Warhammer; I think it might be about right and it looks like they deliberately limited numbers much like Disney has done with videos.

 

[Vladd67]

Part of the problem is warhammer historical no longer exists.