I was jogging through Half-Price Books the other day (I HAVE to go there at least once a week, but I try to move fast so as to minimize the number of books I'm compelled to purchase) when I caught a glimpse of this beauty:
It stopped me in my tracks. I've been hopelessly in love with Arundhati Roy since I read The God of Small Things (one of the greatest novels of all time, by the way), and though I haven't read all of her books, I've kept up with her. Or thought that I had, because I somehow missed this one.
At first I guessed that it must've just been published, but a peek at the copyright page showed that it had actually come out in 2019, so I really managed to miss that boat. The price was $14.99, and it was HEFTy...1,000 pages hefty. I would have bought it immediately, of course, but the weight of it was intimidating. And I have So Many books already. And SUREly the Louisville Free Public Library could be counted on to have this tome, right? So I put the book back on its little kickstand and carefully backed away.
When I got home I checked the LFPL website and...nope. I was astonished.
So I thought I'd see what I could see elsewhere, starting with Amazon.
That Kindle price seemed a bit steep, though. So I poked around some more, and ended up on the book's publisher's website, my old friend Haymarket Books. And check this out:
So riddle me this: why is Amazon charging almost twice as much as the publisher for the e-book version here? I have heard a lot about Amazon selling books at lower prices so that they can undercut publishers, thus robbing said publishers of their fair profits, but this seems to be a simple case of inflating the price to rip off the consumer. And a quick look around The Usual Suspects on my used bookstores online shows that there is no print version that can compete here, so the unwary buyer might well think $14.99 was a good price for the ebook.
Nope.
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