Leonard Erickson wrote
 
-------exploding CDs prices
 
> Well, while they went wway overboard, there
> actually *was* a reasom why book prices jumped
> drastically a while back and things quit staying
> on the shelves long.
 
 There's certainly been more than one major
 price hike over the years. Don't know which one
 you have in mind but the one I referred to was
 after the huge conglomerates started buying up
 publishing houses and the publishing houses
 started to see themeselves not as 'book
 publishers' but as part of gigantic 'media/
 communication empires'. Lots of articles and
 analyses at the time on the theme of 'Publishing
 goes Hollywood'.
 
 The rationale for the price hike I'm referring to,
 btw, had nothing much to do with real costs or the
 economy of the industry -- it was pure greed
 (what this thread is about, although we've been
 presenting some of these harebrained schemes in a
 humorous manner) and it's now more or less
 apparent to anyone -- including the man in the
 street, who is justifiably pissed off at the
 ridiculous prices and the limitations placed on
 what he can do with the product he buys -- a point
 you yourself make in a post close by. All this is
 of course more apparent when discussing CDs and
 videos/DVDs, which are more popular media than
 books.
 
 But to get back on subject: The rationale of that
 specific price hike was that movies/videos cost
 $XXX so why should books cost less. In other
 words, pure bull****. Or, as I said earlier, pure
 greed. Believe it or not the rationake was as
 simple and simpleminded as that.
 
> Seems there was a tax case involving a machine
> tool manufacturer. They would make up a large
> batch of the (very expensive) gizmos they made,
> and sell them over an extended period. This had
> major tax advantages.
 
 I remember that tax case. That goes way back,
 doesn't it -- the 1970s? Way before what I'm taking
 about. It was an IRS fluke ruling that applied only
 by chance to publishers, and that they tried like
 hell to get themselves exempted from. [Don't know
 if they eventually succeeded?] But they received a
 lot of hysterical coverage in the press about how
 this was going to bankrupt the industry, wipe out
 cultural institutions, etc. Gross exaggeration.
 Production of books is far more flexible than
 products that need tooling -- especially after
 computers came into use in the industry. They used
 it as an excuse for a long time; didn't know they
 were still using it.
 
 

--- Maximus/2 3.01