To think there’s no hope anymore financially after seeing the price of this…?!

Why don't you wait for an offer or get second hand?

Honestly you rarely have to pay the silly money price if you are patient/ savvy.

Exactly, it's like quoting the price of a Ferrari and claiming that the entire population has been priced out of owing a car.

I know prices have risen but when people try to base their argument on such ridiculous examples they lose all credibility.

Hardback books have always been expensive and there's always been free or very cheap ways of accessing books and that's not changed despite the CoL crisis.

Please please please use your local library. You can reserve books on line or over the phone. Then go & collect them when you get notified.

I use Kindle Unlimited - £9.99 a month. Get access to lots of titles- not everything but many.

It isn't really about book prices. We have gone through years of stable prices and now, when costs go up, it's a shock. When I was a kid in the 1970s, I remember my mother sending me to buy a loaf of bread and giving me the money that she thought it would be that day. She didn't always get it right. Prices were unstable and climbing.

We're once again in a time of unstable and rising prices. If, like me, you got used to the contants of some goods, the rise is hard to accept. Up to Covid, I used to wait for Heinz soups to go on sale at 50p each before stocking up. These days, a can of Heinz soup for 50p seems like winning the lottery.

Book prices are only one sign of the instability when it comes to prices. All we can do is make each penny count and spend with intention.

The OP can obviously afford to buy books. She's deliberately chosen by far the most expensive way of buying books, and is complaining about it. If she was genuinely struggling, she'd at least buy e-books, or second hand books from charity shops or Ebay. There are cheap books everywhere. Or just join your local library where they're completely free.

I've self-published a couple of books on Amazon (you won't have heard of me, they did nothing). I charge the absolute minimum for paperbacks that Amazon allows and I have to charge £7.99 for my short to mid length novel. Amazon won't let me sell it much cheaper (I think I rounded it up to £7.99 but it would have only been pennies). I have a little more control over ebook prices, but they're still controlled, which means that it's cheaper to read on a Kindle. Or, in my case, the kindle app on my phone and my laptop. It's not always the author's fault. When I've gone onto alternative sites, the price isn't much lower as the costs for print on demand paperbacks aren't cheap.

For reading, if you can get into reading on a kindle or kindle app, it's worthwhile looking at Kindle Unlimited. It's just under a tenner a month and there's a decent selection, though you won't be able to get all of the books that you want. You can also sign up for ARC reading, that's Advance Reader Copies, where you can get a free copy of an ebook, often in advance of publication, in return for an honest review. The quality can be hit and miss but you can find some free hidden gems. There's also places like Wattpad and Royal Road which have nonconventional stories and story structure but that are free to read.

If you make a thing of reviewing books on places like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or blogs, once you are established, authors will be throwing free copies at you and begging for reviews, just saying.

What would you live off if you lost your job? I have a fairly high income but if I lost my job I’d have much bigger concerns than my inability to buy a hardback book!

I don't have a mental idea of what new hardback books should cost, because I almost never buy them at new RRP. Either I borrow from a library, buy secondhand or heavily discounted from Amazon or a discount bookseller. Even on a good income it seems a waste to spend money to spend money on new hardbacks. I only really buy new books as gifts, or at an author signing. I buy quite a lot of used children's books from Vinted, which can work out very cheap for bundles.

I have just got a Kobo which is better than a kindle for me, as I can borrow books for free rather than paying kindle prices.

How can you have both 'quite a lot of disposable income' yet 'not have much spending money in reality'?
And why wouldn't you care if you lost a six-figure job? Have you been reading threads on here about how everyone on UC is coining it in?

I’ve read about 70 books this year. All of these have either been kindle deals (99p) or library books. I wouldn’t be able to afford it otherwise! However, I do think there’s an issue here where seriously talented writers don’t make much money at all and I do feel guilty about this.

They are expensive, kinda glad my menopause brain can't cope with books at the moment. But, so is music these days. My other half wanted 2 vinyl LP's and one CD from Gary Numan's web shop. Cost me over £90. I guess artists/authors get ripped off so badly with stuff going online to download that the price has had to go up too.

I’m a book dealer and new hardback books have often been £20 since the 90s. Although when actually released, there’s often half price deals in a lot of the major retailers, on the mainstream books anyway.

Final bits for under the Christmas tree shop I did recently
Bought everyone their favourite choccy bars plus few tins of biscuits
The meat joints were cheaper when their prices were deducted from receipt than the sweeties themselves were!

That's how much things really should cost though. It's not a race to the bottom of how companies can cut corners and produce worse quality things to make them even cheaper. Cheap chocolate means someone down the chain isn't getting paid. Cheap clothes means poor labour conditions and loss of craftsmanship. Cheap journalism/writing/art means truly good writers drop out of that field as they have bills to pay. Cheap food means... Need I go on?

If you look at the price of things in countries like Switzerland or Sweden, this is really how much things should be costing to pay poorer workers lower down the chain a decent wage, and the customer expects a decent product for that price, whether it's a cup of coffee, cinnamon bun, chocolate bar. Enshittification is much less accepted.

Have absolutely no issue personally paying 20-30 quid for a book. If I buy a book, I want to sponsor the author and others involved in making that book happen to continue to make more. This is what buying a book is, patronage of the creative industries.

This is the cost of a couple of days' food and will keep you going for much longer than that, stay with you. Can you say the same about a Pret sandwich and a coffee?

Of course, not everybody wants to do that or can do that, or doesn't need to buy everything in print to own, which is why very cheap or free second hand books are widely available, as are libraries.

Lecture over.

Personally I refuse to buy anything cheap, as I choose to vote with my money what kind of economic practices should prevail, what's worth paying for and what isn't. I rarely buy anything cmpared to most, but when I do, it won't be the cheapest thing I can track down, but the thing that deserves to exist on merit.

Appreciate not everybody can do that, but hopefully me paying more and also selling things I no longer need 2nd hand will allow someone else to access art more affordably, and keep good things like books alive.

I still consider books to be cheap. You can buy a book written by a fantastic author from anywhere in the world and be entertained and educated by it for days, and the e-book probably costs £6 or so. And you can buy books which are out of copyright for nothing or next to nothing, including the greatest books ever written.

Hardback books are luxury items. Just wait for the paperback or buy the e-book (usually but not always a lot cheaper than the paperback). Over half of books published on Amazon are independently published, and most of those will be print on demand. It's much more expensive to publish a book that way, so those books may be more expensive unless you buy the e-book version.

I recently paid £22 for a signed first edition of Empire of the Dawn - well worth it, because I'm invested in that series and will reread it.

For me it depends on whether it's an author I collect and whether I class the books as 'trashy novels' (this is not a pejorative term!) - I tend to get those from WOB for £4 a pop.

Do you like to have food to eat? A roof over your head when you are asleep?

I really can only afford to buy on Amazon nowadays. I went into my local bookshop last week and the book I was searching for was eighteen pounds. It was nine pounds on Amazon.
Its great if you can afford to support local bookshops but many of us can't.....

Mate, on benefits your £22 would be your weekly grocery budget. I doubt you'd be on the street if you bought the book. Catch yourself on

I really really value a high street bookshop. I would never buy on Amazon. I’m on your salary and buy a couple of hardbacks a year. I usually wait for the paperback.

You also wouldn't be able to house and feed yourself though.

I buy everything second hand but I've noticed the prices on sites like World of Books and rebuy.de and medimops (I live abroad) are creeping up all the time too.
I can't afford new paperbacks, never mind new hardbacks.

I used to own two secondhand bookshops , until we had to move halfway across the country, and I always had a number of clients who were voracious readers , like me . If I recommended an author to them, they would read one , and then usually if they enjoyed it , everything they had done . I had clients who walked out with 5 or 6 books regularly with change from a tenner . This was not that long ago .

Recently I went into a charity bookshop, and they were charging £6 for a paperback ! Now that did make my eyebrows rise .