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Prices of books

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2016

Katherine Livingston
Katherine Livingston*
Affiliation:
Book Review Editor, Science, Washington, D.C. 20005
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Extract

The prices of scientific books are much talked about, but data to serve as points of reference on the subject are hard to come by. Table 1 shows the results of some attempts to find such data. The first row of data given is taken from the most frequently cited set of statistics on book prices, the average per-volume prices of hardcover books (U.S. domestic and imported) published annually by the R. R. Bowker Company. The Bowker tabulation attempts to be exhaustive but includes under “science” (i.e., Dewey Decimal 500–599) books intended for general audiences and therefore can be expected to underestimate the prices of books needed by working scientists.

Type
Current Happenings
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , Fall 1980 , pp. 377 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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References

1 I thank Irma Y. Johnson, Janet M. Kegg, Nina S. Root, and Thomas J. M. Schopf for providing information and other assistance. I am also grateful to the representatives of various publishers a sampling of whose views is presented here and to a number of librarians and scientist authors and editors who also provided useful information.Google Scholar
2 See exchanges on these issues in Nature (G. W. Brindley, 12 June 1980, p. 434; R. Campbell, 3 July 1980, p. 8; P. V. E. McClintock, 3 July 1980, p. 8) and in Scholarly Publishing (A. M. Friedland, April 1979, pp. 275–278; A. Vandermeulen, April 1980, pp. 243–246; A. M. Friedland, October 1980, pp. 89–91).Google Scholar
3 Readers who wish to pursue the subject might begin with an account by H. C. Morton (Scholarly Publishing, July 1980, pp. 361–370) of why it remained intractable to the best efforts of an auspiciously funded 3½-year study employing as many as 16 persons at a time. The results of the study are reported in Fritz Machlup and Kenneth Leeson's Information through the Printed Word: The Dissemination of Scholarly, Scientific, and Technical Knowledge (Praeger, New York, 1978–1980), volume 1 of which deals with book publishing. Some general discussion of factors that determine the prices of books is to be found in D. N. Fischel's Book publishing—and bookkeeping (Science, 13 May 1966, pp. 871–875) and H. S. Bailey's The Art and Science of Book Publishing (Harper and Row, New York, 1970). Further data on book prices are published yearly in The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information.Google Scholar