: Why do hardcover books retail for more than three times the cost of softcover books? One thing I've noticed while browsing bookstores is that hardcover books tend to cost more than softcover

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The hardcover version is the full version of the book. It costs full price. It is sold on the first day the book is available and marketed to the most enthusiastic readers who are willing to pay full price, and who typically want the prestige and ruggedness of hardcover. It is not designed to be cheap. It’s designed to be prestigious and enduringly rugged.

The paperback version is the cheap version of the book. It is cheaper because it is primarily designed to be cheap. The thick cardboard is replaced with thin cardboard, the thick paper with thin paper, the color illustrations with black and white, and so on. It is available about a year after the hardcover and is marketed to readers who are either less enthusiastic than the hardcover readers, or more budget-conscious.

An analogy for this in movies is the way that a movie is released in 8K quality for per ticket at the cinema on day one, and then a year later you can watch the same movie in 2K quality on Netflix as part of your monthly subscription. The people who are most excited to see the movie want to see it in higher quality and don’t care that it is per ticket. The people who watch it a year later are less excited and want to see it cheaply and don’t care that it is lower quality.

As an example, “The Wolf of Wall Street” was released:

hardcover September 25, 2007 .52
paperback August 26, 2008 .77

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Since many books are written based on an advance to the author from the publisher, I imagine there's also a component of them trying to regain that advance earlier in the sales cycle.

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This article shows an example breakdown of the costs involved in making a hardcover book:

Based on a list price of .95

.55 - Pre-preduction - This amount covers editors, graphic
designers, and the like
.83 - Printing - Ink, glue, paper, etc
.00 - Marketing - Book tour, NYT Book Review ad, printing and shipping
galleys to journalists
.80 - Wholesaler - The take of the middlemen
who handle distribution for publishers
.19 - Author Royalties - A
bestseller like Grisham will net about 15% in royalties, lesser known
authors get less. Also the author will be paying a slice of this pie
piece to his agent, publicist, etc.

This leaves .58, Money magazine calls this the profit margin for the retailer, however when was the last time you saw a bestselling novel sold at its cover price.

Salon.com also has an interesting post on what makes books cost as much as they do. According to that article, the physical cost of the book comes from the quality of paper, the printing, and the binding. That accounts for about 20% of the book's final price. The rest covers the publisher's other costs (editing staff, promotions, etc.), distribution costs, and booksellers' profit. The author also gets a cut - typically around 10% or 15% of the price.

There are other considerations in book pricing, but they seem to have more to do with how the bookselling industry works than with the book format, so I'm omitting them here. The Salon article goes into more details, though, and there is also some interesting information here about hardcover pricing if you look past the political bent of some of the comments.

I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of the costs involved in making a paperback, so I looked at lulu.com - a self-publishing service - to get a ballpark figure. I ran their manufacturing price calculator on roughly the same parameters.

For a paperback, I used 100 pages of standard paper, black & white printing, US Trade size (6" x 9"), bound with the "perfect bound" binding. The manufacturing cost on that came out to US .50 per book.

For a hardcover, I used the same parameters except for binding. With casewrap binding, the cost was US per book and including a dust jacket bumped that up to US .

So it seems to me that if we assume that marketing and distribution costs are roughly the same for all types of books, the production costs would account for a good part of the price discrepancy.

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Because the hardcover books come out sooner than the paperback books. It's like the difference between a movie being released in the theaters and coming out on DVD. In both cases, you pay to get it early.

Though hardcover books are of higher quality, I doubt the manufacturing costs play a significant role in the price difference.

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I would imagine because they're bigger, heavier, of higher quality, etc.
edit: i stated this because production costs would be higher, the shipping/transportation costs are higher, the storage and shelving cost is higher. also hard backs seem, to me, to last longer.

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