Have you ever wanted a book so
much that you'll do whatever you can to get it? Spend over two hundred dollars?
Call every used bookstore within a fifty-mile radius? Shop on eBay until you drop?

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t
gotten overly excited when my mom gave me her first edition of the Twilight
series (no judging, please) or when I received a beautiful special edition of
the Brontës sisters’ collected
works for Christmas.  But I’ve never
spent more than forty dollars on a book that I really wanted.

Like most people in my position
(happily employed by a publisher of books), I love books. Not the crazy
obsessive love that some take too far by saying books are better than people .
. . but I do appreciate the art of writing a book, what it can mean to people,
and now, more than ever, what it takes to produce one.

Lucky for me, I am dating
someone who also loves books. He is the reason I found myself surrounded by
stacks of dog-eared books in a cramped and uncomfortably closed-in store recently.
We were on a book hunt for the first editions of a certain character series by
a certain author circa 1988. (If you must know which one, I'll happily answer
if you ask nicely on Twitter: @ravestal.) He was so determined to find the
books that we visited one local bookstore, two Barnes and Noble locations, and
three used book stores. 

After some success at the first
B&N, we found nothing at the next four stores, but the last one, where he
found and bought three cloth editions, made his collection almost complete.  He didn’t exactly spend over two hundred
dollars, but it got me thinking: What is the “price” someone will pay for a
book they really, really want?

A
New York Times best-selling author’s
survey showed that “when it comes
to pricing, 52% said if they want a book badly enough, they don’t care what it
costs, but 22% said they won’t pay more than $4.99 for a book.” That’s where e-books
come in.

E-books give people the option of owning a book at a relatively
inexpensive price. In fact, the overall cost of e-books is projected to decrease even more. The University Press of Kentucky
recently started a program that rewards customers with a free e-book when they buy the print version. Heck! You
can even download completely free e-books off Amazon if you don’t have your
sights set on a brand-new book.

Sure, some people love e-books.
They are fast, convenient, easy, and cheap. But many people also love physical
books. Holding a new book, turning real pages, the smell of the paper, or
finding the first edition to complete your bookshelf gives readers something e-books
can never give . . .  a certain
book-satisfaction that those crazy book lovers crave.  

I think the printed book is here to stay, as
are e-books. But if book prices continue to fall, will publishers be able to
continue producing the same product?

Let’s just say we are working on
it.

-Rosemary