> Yes, I couldn't agree more.
> All greedy authors should be content to live on 2 cents per word, and
> that should not be inflation adjusted, since we know that talk is cheap.
> No books should be printed on longer-lasting acid-free stock.
> Paper should not cost any more, since we know that the price of
> titanium dioxide is much less than it used to be, and we know that the
> cost of cleaning up paper mills' waste into the rivers was really no cost
> at all.
> Four and five-color illustrations are disconcerting. One should only
> read books. A good copper cut is quite good enough. Photographs will
> never catch on.
> Binders--well that's a sorry lot. Why on earth should they use Roxite
> or better cloth, when they could reach back into time and use
> starch-filled cloth. Creeps, all.
> Typesetters--another sorry lot. Why, in my day, they loved to ingest
> the lead fumes from their Linotype machines. A pox on all these cold-type
> machines. From managment's perspective, it was much cheaper to have them
> die off young than to pay into their retirement funds.
> Sewing signatures with cotton thread was good. Cotton was cheap and the
> tenant farmers were so grateful that it was used for books that they
> could not afford to buy for their children.
> Horse-hoof glue was good enough for the books of the 1940s, since,
> after all, the pages fell apart before they fell out, or was it that the
> pages fell out before the paper fell apart. The deteriorating books
> smelled so good, too.
> Yep, today's book is a real rip off. The paperback that is printed in
> 16pp signatures,lies flat, printed on acid-free stock, stitched with
> dacron, bound with an everlasting glue, covered with a better cloth or a
> PVC cover---why all this makes one want to find a good vellum scroll and
> start reading.
> Bob
While I agree that book construction methods have advanced, aren't
you really going back quite a while when you're talking about
hot-type and copper cuts? I think the argument was on increases in
the last twenty or thirty years.
I know that the markup on book has got to be huge, even more so than
consumer electronics and jewelry, which I've always thought were the
two biggest. I buy a lot of my books from the Book-of-the-month
club. Just before Christmas I bought the newest Stephen King for
$7.95, and Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" for $5.95. The
Hawking was hardback, and while the King was paperback, that's only
because the Dark Tower Series have all been paperback-only, except
for the limited/signed editions. I know that the Book club didn't
lose money on either sale, either.
Don't get me started on $1.50 comic books, either. I'm just glad I
don't read the damned things.
Scott
|