Something has gone terribly wrong. I am addicted to buying books, and the people who publish them won't take my money. Or rather, they want my money, but only after putting me through a kind of Hobson's choice loyalty test: pay what I can't afford for a new hardcover or jump through unpleasant hoops to even get near that book when my desire to own it burns brightest.
Several weeks ago, I heard Lorrie Moore talk about her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, on the radio and decided I need that book right now. I left the radio on and, mid-workday, charged down to my local bookseller.
$25.95 in hardcover. Damn. I just got married and 30 bucks on a single title is not in my paying-off-a-wedding budget. No matter, I thought, rounding the corner to my local library branch. A Gate at the Stairs has a (no joke) 73-person waiting list. Which left me with the following choices.
I can wait until paperback. Which is no answer at all. Telling a customer with a burning desire to wait is lunacy. That's like a restaurant telling me to order the six-course prix fixe or leave hungry.
I can buy a cheap(er) copy from Amazon/B&N/Half.com/etc., which cheats my local independent bookstore out of the sale.
I can buy it digitally and read it on a $300 reading device I don't own.
I can lie to Ms. Moore's publisher and say I'm reviewing Gate and have them send me a copy.
I can mug a patron leaving the bookstore or engage in related criminal behavior, which renders the $30 price tag a nonissue.
I am aware that the cost of a hardcover book is not arbitrary, and any number of people—authors, editors, designers, vendors—must get paid before there's a book for me to read at all. Nor do I view our business as a drama of avarice with the reader cast as sucker. But wittingly or not, large publishers have priced their core product—the new hardcover book—as the cultural equivalent of a luxury good, more expensive than an opening night movie ticket, a new CD, or an evening in front of the television. Are we then surprised when customers choose these other options? The pricing practically insists upon it.
There are devastating economic and social costs to the perception of publishing's core product being “too expensive.” Luxury goods are a small market, difficult to expand and vulnerable to economic fluctuations. A high opening price not only scares off eager book customers but also may drive them into the arms of a cheaper competitor. All of which leaves aside that exactly no one chooses a career in publishing in order to distribute books among the comfortable, or the repulsive notion that reading is an elite activity with knowledge and literature reserved for those who can afford it.
Change is coming. BookSwim has pioneered a “Netflix for Books” subscription model. Paper Back Swap and Book Mooch have peer-to-peer networks to facilitate free trades. DailyLit.com will e-mail you a free chapter a day. Straight-to-paperback publishing is on the rise, and the battle over fair pricing for e-books is far from over.
Yet these movements are largely economic instead of cultural. As much at play is our industry's attachment to a past that no longer holds. A premium hardcover followed much later by a cheaper paperback made sense in the Great Before of independent bookselling, when publishers owned themselves, and there was less media distraction and more patience for a single title or author to develop a readership.
In difficult economic times, no industry can afford to have its pricing structure effectively issue ultimatums to eager consumers. Not unless they'd prefer to stake their collective fortune with Job and his gang of thieves rather than shopaholics with too much desire and too little to spend it on.
Oh, and as for A Gate at the Stairs? After much complaining to anyone who would listen, I'm the first customer in my local bookseller's new hardcover book rental program.
