Why is paperback more expensive

I can sympathize with them. Take Framed , for example — the first book in my Hardwick series. The reason behind that price is a balancing act between making money for me and saving money for readers. If I charge less than that, my royalty rate is cut down by more than half. Because I am running a business here, I do want to keep my royalty rate as high as I can get it.

Amazon takes their cut, but the cost of producing and delivering the book is essentially nothing. You buy the book, and a copy of the file is sent to your Kindle device instantly.

In print format, Framed is a page book. But we also have to factor in two important differences to the Kindle version. First, Amazon has a different royalty rate for print books. They will have either a matt or gloss lamination and possible some embossing on the cover. These mass-market books are produced in huge quantities, sometimes upwards of , at any one time for popular titles such as the Jack Reacher series which sells a single book every 9 seconds.

Mass market book printing is fantastic for printing large quantities of books at a very quick rate. You also get a lower unit cost than if you were printing shorter run books.

Not everyone has six figures to spend on the cost of mass-market book printing. This is were short-run digital printing comes in. You can have your paperback books printed at a low unit cost and not have to spend thousands on a large print run. The unit cost will not be as low as the mass market books but your paperback book will still be printed at the same quality — sometimes better.

Get a quote and check out the prices for book printing here. A hardcover book is, as the term suggests, a book with a hardcover. They are often called hardback books but hardcover and hardback books are the same. Comparing a hardback cover to a paperback cover is difficult as many book printers use many different materials. Hardcover books usually have a thick heavy card for the cover, between 2.

The covers on hardcover books are much thicker than paperbacks and it can make the book feel a lot more durable and give the hardcover a premium feel. Deciding on what cover options you would like for your hardcover book can be a little confusing at first. There are so many cover options and custom options. The covers are normally printed on coated paper, such as matt, gloss or silk in the range of gsm to gsm. This cover is then wrapped around the hardcover boards and stuck to the card with an adhesive.

You will see this type of hardcover in almost every bookshop. They are very popular and easy to make compared to the other type of hardback cover design. You can still have custom options with the printed paper case, embossing, debossing, foiling, head and tail bands, marker ribbons etc. The cloth is applied to the hardcover books in a similar way to the printed paper case bound books. Clothbound books tend to have a more premium feel than the regular hardcover bound books.

Clothbound hardcover books almost always come with some type of foiling applied directly to the cloth wibalin. The foiling can come in different colours and applied to the front cover and the spine of the book. It is quite popular to have a dustjacket wrapped around any hardcover book that is clothbound.

It is printed on similar material to the printed paper case which allows the dust jacket to be laminated and then wrapped around the hardcover.

The dust jacket can have various custom printing options such as embossing, foiling and many more. Dustjackets need to wrap around the book and then wrap around the cover boards and have what is called a flap. The flap of the dust jacket wraps around to the inside of the book. The flaps on a dust jack usually extra information such as a biography of the author and the blurb of the book. The good thing about dust jackets for your hardcover books is that when they start deteriorating you can print some more off very easily.

This can keep you clothbound wibalin book in good condition and protect the foiling. With the number of choices you have with hardcover books — you really can make your book something to be very proud of. In all honesty, when answering the question if you should choose a hardback or a paperback book, it really depends on what you want from your book as to what form of book you go for.

This goes for academic texts too. Both paperbacks and hardbacks are more expensive than books for the general public due to extremely limited demand, the time-preference of needing the newest scholarship for university libraries, and all compounded by the monopolistic cartel-like behaviour of publishers. A significant problem, especially, as I previously explored , for academic eBooks.

Older books are also just better than new ones, both in content and in their hidden secrets, so I find browsing second-hand bookshops much more rewarding. Even when the paperback is out, the hardback costs more if still in print. We place greater value on the binding as we do for our time-preference. Hence special bindings and editions cost so much, and people are prepared to pay. Their scarcity and ornateness drive their price.

The extras such as lovely new colour images, new introductions and updates from authors or editors, and of course the lovely new covers and bindings, all make for gorgeous books to own and display. I could never pay the full price since I am sadly not made of money. Books in general tend to be cheap these days. The monopoly on book discovery and selling allows Amazon to force prices to be what they like.

Authors would obviously love to see higher prices for a more comfortable living, but they must perform a balancing act, otherwise people would find them too expensive and not buy.