It has been announced that there will be a new Dan Brown out on September 15th.
Titled The Lost Symbol, it will be his third with Robert Langdon. The book will have a retail price $28.95, the initial print run has been announced as being 5 million copies, and various on-line sites have already announced discounts of at least 40%.
That means that you’ll be able to order the book for around the same price as we have to pay the publisher. That means few people will bother to order the book from independents or anyone who doesn’t offer a deep discount.
We won’t. We couldn’t afford to.
So the book will have an incredibly high retail price, will be printed in numbers that guarantee it will never be collectable and will be readily available from big corporate concerns at a give-away price. Why should we even bother to order any?
There comes a point when the publishers arrangements - the price they put on the book, the discounts they give to some retailers but not to others - make it difficult if not counterproductive to stock and sell their books. This is looking like one of those cases.
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