Hi, awesome nerds!
I have been thinking a lot about my post from earlier this week and the pricing of physical books in Canada.
And then I realized that there was a crucial flaw in my findings. I had only looked at one sample. One book, from one publisher. So today, I tried to remedy that.
Here are the books I decided to compare across my four readily available bookstores.
- The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Penguin Random House)
- The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (HarperCollins)
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (Hachette Book Group)
- Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman (Simon & Schuster)
- Radicalized by Cory Doctorow (Macmillan)
This is still going to be an imperfect comparison, because of different imprints and different genres, etc. But, I think this is going to give me a better idea of the whole picture. I made sure I was comparing the same version of the book.
Prairie Sky Books | McNally Robinson | Chapters/Indigo | Amazon Canada | |
The Water Dancer | $37.00 | $37.00 | $25.55 | $24.00 |
The Pull of the Stars | $33.99 | $33.99 | $25.00 | $36.07 |
Parable of the Sower | $22.99 | $22.99 | $22.99 | $22.99 |
Big Friendship | $35.00 | $35.00 | $33.87 | $33.38 |
Radicalized | $22.99 | $21.99 | $20.96 | $19.05 |
You can see that the difference in price is generally not as shocking as with Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad – and there are some publishers where the difference is within $2, or there’s no difference at all.
(A note: I really wish I had the spoons to do more of a deep dive into this. I’m sure there are even tools for exactly this type of thing (checking the price of a title across multiple vendors) that I am unaware of.)
So, is the root cause of the difference because of the publisher and/or the imprint? Is there another factor at play that I still haven’t thought of?
Are you a Canadian bookworm who has noticed this difference, as well? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with the price difference of physical books in Canada!
Stay bookish, lovelies! ♥
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