According to AmortizationTable.org, 25 cents in 1939 is equivalent to $5.79 today, adjusted for inflation.
There are very few new books available for less than $6.00 these days, let alone the convenience of a Pocket Book format. I was lucky to grow up during their peak of popularity, buying and reading a dozen or two each year. A whole book at the cost of two or three chocolate bars, when I was young.
With all the improvements in technology in the past 50 years, it is difficult to understand how the cost hasn’t come down. But instead, it has gone up. These days, if I find an interesting new book for under $60, I consider it a bargain.
I worked at a used book store for years, and I’d say that $6 was the threshold for a decent book that there was some meaningful demand for, and ~$3 was a good median price for a regular shmegular paperback, with a little bit more or less depending on level of demand. Used books was an interesting business to be in, because you were checking against market demand every single day. If a book hadn’t been selling, you marked it down and charged less for the next one. If you priced a book and it sold within minutes, you knew you should charge more for the next one. If publishers and retail bookstores can’t be bothered to pay attention to what customers want and what they’ll pay, then they deserve to not make sales.
The cost of books has gone up bc paper has gotten more expensive in general. Now that less people use paper because of the Internet, all of the forests that were used/replanted to create paper and the companies using those forests no longer exist so the resource is more specialized and hard to come by
Why are ebooks so expensive?
The fairies that move all the electrons unionized
imho unionized fairies would be cheaper because they would be given a living wage instead of being denied piss breaks and humane conditions while the profits went to bezos.
There is one silver lining: Shadow Libraries. I used to buy ebooks, but removing DRMs was a headache. I buy a physical copy if I really buy the book.
The article addresses this:
One might suspect that materials, distribution, or other book-specific costs had risen over the intervening decades. But how then to explain that the mass-market paperback’s older sibling — the hidebound hardcover — hasn’t seen an inflation nearly so dramatic? […] In 1939, you could buy ten mass-market paperbacks for the cost of a single new hardback. In 2024, you could barely buy two. Which means that under the leadership of the Big Five and their equally hegemonic national retail partners, the flagship product favored by elite-facing bookstores in wealthy enclaves got cheaper, and the format with the proven mass potential got many times more expensive.
Hardcovers use more paper than paperbacks. They’re usually larger and the cover contains cardboard, which is several layers of paper. Even if the risen cost of paper plays a role, the difference in inflation between the two formats should not have been this big.
But most of the cost of a book is not paper. What about the author’s fee, storage, marketing, and typesetting? How much more paper does a hardback use than a paperback - not that much. Have there been any changes in how hardbacks are produced since 1939 that may contribute to a narrowing of the prices? I believe they are often glued, not sewn, now, for example.
In my part of the world, fewer people are visiting bookstores now that social media dominates nearly all aspects of life, but at the same time, some cities have ordinances requiring the use of paper bags.
Remove easy access to books, remove proper journalism, remove facts.
Welcome to the future.
I’m a big fan of paperback originals that were published in the 50s-70s. These are books that were first published in paperback at a time when more respectable books were always first published in hardcover. Most of them are genre (sci fi, detective, spy, romance, crime, horror, action) and prioritize entertainment over literary appeal. They were the sort of books that people would buy near the cash register and read at the bus stop or during their lunch break.
My local non-used book stores barely stock any of the mass market format books that spawned the paperback original; everything has moved to the more expensive trade format. Fortunately there are decades of books still available in the old mass market format. You can certainly find them online and at used bookstores, but I recommend checking out your local library annual sale (https://booksalefinder.com/) for a fun and cheap way to acquire reading entertainment.
Well this spurred me to buy 4 paperbacks from Abe books. Been buying them used from there for a while, and they always turn up great. Each like $5 or less.
That’s Amazon.
sonofabitch he’s right. amazon bought abe books in 2008. Shit. I was specifically trying NOT to use them
My bi-weekly trips to the library for the last 50 years has made me ignorant of issues like this.
