How much did you pay for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? How much is a book worth to you? At BooksfromScotland.com we knew we could never be the cheapest, so we haven't even tried. Publisher Bloomsbury set the price of this 600 page hardback at £17.99. All the major retailers immediately set their prices at around half that; the supermarkets undercut them by a few pennies. ASDA were reportedly selling copies for just £5.00.
ASDA won't have made any money at all selling the final Harry Potter. If I were a shareholder I'd be tempted to ask why. Even the chains like Waterstone's will only really break even.
So who got it wrong? Did Bloomsbury set the price too high for children, as ASDA have claimed? How much do you think is a fair price? If everybody sold it at full price, how many genuine Harry Potter fans would have paid it?
Here's another question for you: how much did you pay for the last CD album you bought? A recent release, rather than an old favourite. I'm guessing you paid the full price, or near enough. The book industry doesn't work like that though, and does its best to sell the best new stuff as cheaply as possible, and hope that they can make the money back later.
It's a crazy world, book publishing.
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- Liam
- Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
- The editor of BooksfromScotland.com, the e-commerce and information site created by Publishing Scotland
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1 comment:
I paid £8.99 for my UK copy at the Waterstone's in Cambridge, Eng. where I'm living at the moment, and $17.95 to Amazon for the US copy I had shipped to my parents' house for when I returned. I have no doubt that most people would've happily paid full price for the hardback. Those who didn't want to would've waited for the paperback to come out at a cheaper price.
The independant bookseller I prefer to use in Salt Lake City, Utah, when I'm at home charged the full US price for the book, but their website photos show they had several hundred people show up for their Potter Party. They were not the least bit hurt by selling the book at full price. True, they didn't sell as many copies as Amazon did, but they sold hundreds of copies from their single store and presumably made their usual profit, as they sold the book at full price. Had I been in town, I would've bought my copy there to support local business.
I think a Harry Potter book would've sold at any price, and the "official" price was reasonable anyway.
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