Tartan hose book

[Barb T]

It's hard to tell from the web site why the book costs so much, because you can't see how many pages it has or what the nature of the illustrations are. If the authors chose to do a full-color book inside from cover to cover, it would have been a very expensive book just for the printing.

Book pages are normally printed in "signatures" - a set of pages ganged together and printed on big sheets and basically cut apart and bound - rather than as individual pages. If you want to have color illustrations scattered throughout a book, you have no choice but to print every page on a color press. You can cut the cost of printing down dramatically if you cluster all the color illustrations into one signature (depending on the printer, that would typically be multiples of 8 or 16 consecutive pages) and print the entire rest of the book in black and white.

Anyway, that might explain it. On the other hand, maybe they just want to make money selling the book.

And remember that anyone selling a book wholesale will be expected to give a retailer up to a 40-50% discount on the list cost of the book, so someone factors that into the retail selling price when setting the cost of a book. If their book is color inside cover to cover, and they did a small print run, and they need to make even a couple of dollars on the wholesale price of the book.....that could be a pretty expensive book.