So New novels $17.99

[Dave Scarpa]

This seems pretty high but I guess in line with current prices, how have these prices affected your reading? Still buying new or rediscovering older novels? I'm digital but thinking of going back to Dead treee since for $18 I think I want a physical book

 

[Smiley]

I'm seeing $12, $14, and $15 on Kindle for the most recent and upcoming Trek books. It's less than $18 but higher than impulse buy pricing.

I am likely to try the new books at the library first to see if I vibe with them. My collection has hundreds of Trek stories already, and the new release schedule is light, so I am mostly reading the older books currently.

 

[Victoria]

The move to trade paperback was supposed to provide higher quality books than the mass market paperbacks. To my mind, that didn't happen so the move and the price hike was not justified. It almost feels as though the change was to disguise the price rise, the same way that manufacturers change the size and appearance of the things..Newer! Bigger!..so that an increase in unit price gets "lost".

On top of that, I've found the more recent novels quite dull.

I do look out for secondhand books (recently bought the 3 "Gateway" novels I was missing) but can't imagine that I'll be buying any more new ones. My local library system hasn't bought new Star Trek books for some years so I can't "try before I buy" and the prices are now too high to take a casual punt on a novel.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I borrow all the books I read from the library first. If they don't already have copies, I suggest titles for purchase (within 2 years of release - we're allowed to request 3 per month) or request interlibrary loans from other library systems in Canada (after more than two years). What few books I buy are mostly childhood favorites, secondhand from the thrift store or library donation/discard sales.

I don't personally own any Trek books, but my dad does have two fotonovels. ("Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "The City on the Edge of Forever")

 

[Corran Horn]

You'd think more since I buy the books on release but don't get to them in my reading pile until they get dropped down to $2 randomly a few months later.

 

[BillJ]

I buy less now. Though I don't know if the price point is the driving factor. I'm just not as interested in Star Trek as I used to be.

 

[The Wormhole]

Don't worry, there's hardly any new novels released these days so you can still buy the entire annual lineup of new novels and still spend less money than when they were MMPBs.

I joke, of course, but it doesn't really feel like it's that far from the truth all the same.

As a matter of fact, I have been reading a number of older novels from the 80s and 90s the past couple of years. Not so much because of prices of current ones or a dearth of new releases, but rather a couple years ago my family had to clean out my grandmother's house when it went up for sale. My uncle still had his collection of Trek novels there, basically all of them from the 80s and 90s. He had no wish to keep them, so I acquired them and have been gradually picking at them since.

 

[Christopher]

The move to trade paperback was supposed to provide higher quality books than the mass market paperbacks. To my mind, that didn't happen so the move and the price hike was not justified. It almost feels as though the change was to disguise the price rise, the same way that manufacturers change the size and appearance of the things..Newer! Bigger!..so that an increase in unit price gets "lost".

Really, the mass-market paperbacks stayed at an unvarying $7.99 for an astonishingly long time, when they'd more than doubled in price over the equivalent time span before that. So if anything, if their price had gone up normally, they would've cost nearly as much by now as the trade paperbacks do.

The move to trade, by the way, was driven by changes in the bookselling industry as a whole. Book dealers prefer trades to MMPBs because they get a better price point for them, and because they can keep them on the shelves longer. So the whole industry, not just Trek novels, shifted away from MMPBs and toward trades. The quality of the books is not an issue; nobody ever told us to write inferior books for MMPB. We always strove for the best quality we were capable of, regardless of format. The only significant difference is that TPBs tend to be longer. In the past, when MMPBs were the norm, trades and hardcovers did tend to be bigger, "special" stories, but there were plenty of such stories in MMPB format as well.

 

[Victoria]

The quality of the books is not an issue; nobody ever told us to write inferior books for MMPB. We always strove for the best quality we were capable of, regardless of format. The only significant difference is that TPBs tend to be longer. In the past, when MMPBs were the norm, trades and hardcovers did tend to be bigger, "special" stories, but there were plenty of such stories in MMPB format as well.

When I was talking about the quality of the books, I was not referring to the content but the actual physical book.

I was not intending to disparage the writers and I apologise to anyone who felt it came across that way.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I've probably mentioned this elsewhere in the forum, but with the current prices of C$25.99 for the TPBs and C$39.99 for the HCs, I'm actually a bit grateful for the reduced output.

I only ever buy the eBook version as a supplement when they go on sale for C$0.99 - C$3.99.

 

[James Cole]

Inflation isn't evenly distributed... It's interesting how books in general are greatly escalating in cost while film / TV physical media are stable or declining in cost relative to ten years ago.

 

[The Wormhole]

It's interesting how books in general are greatly escalating in cost while film / TV physical media are stable or declining in cost relative to ten years ago.

Probably a reflection of the fact that fewer people are buying DVDs and Blu-Rays these days while book sales continue as strong as ever. Indeed, books are the one market where physical media sales actually surpass digital media sales.

 

[Christopher]

Probably a reflection of the fact that fewer people are buying DVDs and Blu-Rays these days while book sales continue as strong as ever. Indeed, books are the one market where physical media sales actually surpass digital media sales.

I'm not sure of that. If something is a lower-volume seller, isn't the price usually higher to balance that out? Also, when something is manufactured in larger quantities, the per-unit cost of production goes down due to economies of scale, so the price would tend to go down too.

 

[The Wormhole]

I've just noticed that prices of DVDs or Blu-Rays have been getting cheaper as streaming has become more and more popular.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

. . . because they can keep them on the shelves longer . . . .

Funny, for decades I've regularly seen ST and SW and Humanx Commonwealth first edition MMPBs on bookstore shelves years after their copyright dates.

At any rate, inflation in the bookstores is nothing compared to the hobby shops. Back in the 1970s, you could buy an AMT Enterprise kit for maybe $5, or an Athearn HO scale diesel locomotive, almost fully assembled (except for the handrails, typically), and fully capable of running straight out of the box, for under $20. Now, the model locomotives are more realistic, and often come with factory-installed NMRA-standard Digital Command Control (tm) receivers, but they're also typically going for over $200. ($20 might buy you a boxcar, but it probably won't buy you any current-production Star Trek tie-in models)

 

[Corran Horn]

Don't worry, there's hardly any new novels released these days so you can still buy the entire annual lineup of new novels and still spend less money than when they were MMPBs.

I miss the days (long-gone-by) of looking at davidh's psi-phi upcoming books schedule and plotting my expenditures then going on that Tuesday to my local Waldenbooks and picking them up over lunch.

I remember when Avatar came out Mary P. Taylor posted a downtown Chicago B. Dalton released early and I drove down there and snagged them.

 

[Daddy Todd]

This seems pretty high but I guess in line with current prices, how have these prices affected your reading? Still buying new or rediscovering older novels? I'm digital but thinking of going back to Dead tree since for $18 I think I want a physical book

Honestly, I've stopped buying new Trek books, apart from an occasional something special. And, as a collector of Star Trek books for over 50 years, it's been kind of strange.

Not just because of cost, although that has played a role, but lack of space and dissatisfaction with the current offerings helped push me over the edge.

I do enjoy listening to the audio versions during my commutes, so I still get the new ones as part of my Audible membership. At a significant discount. But if Audible stops offering that kind of savings, I really think I could just stop and not look back. I have a couple dozen Trek audiobooks I haven't listened to, along with literally hundreds of Trek dead-tree and/or ebooks in my TBR pile. I can easily read on that pile for the rest of my life without exhausting it.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I've stopped buying new releases. I wait until they arrive at Half Price before purchasing them. That's how I was able to get my hands on the complete/current run of Discovery and Picard novels relatively inexpensive. I haven't purchased the last DS9 or TNG releases because I'm not interested in looking backwards to events set between episodes. I'm more in where Star Trek is going.

 

[Elwro]

I don't see why the Ebooks need to cost $17.69, that's only 30 cents cheaper than the trade paperback... I made a screenshot of what Amazon is offering me with respect to the upcoming Greg Cox novel, here: https://ujchmura-my.sharepoint.com/...5FkDmFXxLtuM8B2gpS4wjjcTfTdlAovBcRsw?e=ol3Nkb

And as a Polish citizen I'm not eligible for the Kindle sales (I have to use amazon.com for Kindle purchases and the Star Trek sales there are only for those registered in the US) :-(

 

[Christopher]

I don't see why the Ebooks need to cost $17.69, that's only 30 cents cheaper than the trade paperback...

For books that are published in large numbers, economies of scale kick in and the cost of the materials and labor that go into printing and shipping a paper book are mere pennies per copy. Most of what you're paying for is not the paper and ink, but the many, many person-hours of labor put into the creation of the book by its writer(s), editor, copyeditors, proofreaders, typesetters, cover designers and artists, marketing team, etc. Those costs are the same regardless of whether it's delivered in print or e-book form.