Friends, buy Harry Potter from a huge bookstore chain, and everything else you read from an independent bookstore.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070611/en_nm/retail_harrypotter_dc
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- Dan
- Father, musician, trail runner, reader, geographer, craft beer aficionado, meditator.
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6 comments:
That is pretty dopey. I think our version of HP7 is coming from Borders and to the extent that I buy books I mix up my purchases. If I were a regular book buyer I might be more inclined to develop a relationship with a local book store.
I wonder how true the contention is, that these guys have slashed costs so much that they won't make any money off of the books. I have no idea what the cost of book printing and binding is, but considering that HP is probably starting with an initial printing in the tens of millions (12M in fact), the cost has to be in the low single digits - somewhere between $1 and $5 with my assumption that it's closer to $1. I found a site that determined that printing 10,000 copies at Kinkos would cost you $3 per book, so larger scale has to be cheaper.
Obviously shipping, marketing and all that goes into the cost of the book, but it takes an awful lot of additional cost to get to the $18+ that Amazon is selling it for, and certianly $35 is off the charts. The 'suggested retail price' is pretty much outright theft.
One could make an environmental argument that the books should be much more expensive, as should most things, because we as a society are not accounting for the real cost of damaging the planet with anything we buy.
How about a 2 percent "carbon credit" tax on all luxury items, Senator Mixdorf?
What's a luxury item?
Books, for one.
Anything you can buy at Best Buy.
Anything you can guy in behind the counter in Quik Trip, or in the checkout aisle at Cub.
As I've discussed before, I've got no problem buying books, although I'm going to be slowing way down on that.
I buy a majority of my books at the local independent (Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City). That's where I've ordered Harry Potter 7. Two copies, actually, since both Cheri and I have the weekend off, and the plan is to read the damn thing. We're geeking out entirely, actually, as we plan to pick the thing up the midnight sale. I draw the line at costumes. I bought the fifth book that way, which was interesting; the store is in the heart of a college town, and drinking establishments flank the store. A few folks asked us if we were lining up for a pub crawl.
At least one copy will go to the public library or a friend.
I'm all for some kind of agreed framework by which things are evaluated vis a vis their 'real' cost.
I will probably also read HP7 that weekend, though we only get one copy - I get it first because I read fast.
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