Books: Put price in perspective By Michelle Kennedy News-Chronicle It happens every time I go book shopping with others, be it my husband, a relative or a friend. We will undoubtedly be walking around the book store and when finally my companion finds something they like, they will turn to the price and put the book back in disgust. “Isn’t this thing in paperback yet?” Is the kind of utterance I will usually hear. In fact, my family and friends often believe I am crazy because I have more problems with spending more than $10 on gas for my car than I have with spending $25 on the new Maeve Binchy novel. For some reason, it is socially acceptable to spend $50 a month for television service, $20 a month to belong to a CD club and even $500 a month (or more) on a new SUV, but $25 for a book? That’s just madness! As my friend, we’ll call her Ellen, put it: “It’s just a bunch of paper and ink - what could possibly cost so much?” She also mumbled something about overpaid bestselling authors, but seeing as how my ultimate goal is to become such an author, I ignored it. There are, of course, many reasons why books cost so much. The physical cost for the book, including illustrations, if any, the printing and binding, the quality of the paper, are roughly 20 percent of the publisher’s cost. The rest of the cost of the book pays for the publishing house’s overhead, which includes publicists, editors, book cover designers and proofreaders. If an author is lucky, they will be sent on a book tour, but not many authors see the glamour side of publishing. In fact, it is a rare author indeed who makes more than say, $10,000, on a book. After you figure in the time an author might have taken from his or her “day job” an author may have made nothing on the venture. “But what about those big advances?” My friend Ellen might ask. Believe it or not, very few authors get such huge advances, and of those who do, some don’t earn any royalties on their books because their advances, which are paid against the royalties, fail to cover the sales of the book. There is also the returns policy for bookstores - great for bookstores, in theory - but not so great for publishers. This policy, developed during the Depression to help sell books during bad economic times, enables bookstores to purchase books from publishers, but then ship them back if they don’t sell for full credit. Sometimes the books are sold, but often publishers ship them to discount retailers who sell them at reduced prices. I talked about the price of books with Dave Dreckschmidt, owner of Dave’s Book Center in the East Town Mall. “I don’t hear too much about the price of books,” he said. “Although sometimes you’ll hear someone mention that a $28 hardcover book is just too much. But still, with a lot of the discounts stores put on books, the hardcover books will usually sell.” Dreckschmidt said that he does hear from older readers sometimes who reminisce about dime paperbacks. “We do have the Dover classics,” he said. “Those are books that are now in the public domain, so they sell for $2 or $3. But again, with those books, the publisher is just worrying about the paper and ink. They don’t need to build name recognition for Dickens.” While this year was not a stellar one for sales for Dave’s or other bookstores, Dreckschmidt said with the holidays approaching sales are improving, reasserting that books are a great gift for any age. As for my friend Ellen, she’s investigating e-books for a better deal on her literature. And that’s fine, I guess. I don’t mind reading my news online, but nothing compares still to a good book on my lap. So when I can’t fill my bookshelf with books because I have little money to spend, I do the next best and most inexpensive thing. I go to the library.