Thoughts...

[L Verge]

The mainstay of the Surratt Museum's gift shop is the wealth of books that we have to offer on the assassination, general Lincoln topics, Victoriana, and of course, the Civil War. In order to clear space, two staff members and I spent several days determining which titles had been in stock for quite awhile and needed to be drastically reduced in price for easy sale. A list of about 25 titles will appear as sale items in the September issue of The Surratt Courier. 95% have been priced at $2 above our original wholesale cost. If you are not a museum member, but would like to receive the list, send me an email requesting it, and I shall email you a copy of that page as an attachment. laurie.verge@pgparks.com.

That said, as we put new price tags on these reduced-price books, I realized how the wholesale prices have increased so drastically over the years that we have been selling books (about 40 years). The wholesale prices are now above what the old-time retail prices used to be! In this list of 25, the average cost to us has been in the $15-$30 range -- in my opinion, a high price for retailers who expect to make any kind of profit.

At one point in my life, I worked as an editor and proof reader for a small printing firm. This was before computer-generated publications, and the price of the job was usually dependent upon the price of paper. In those days, publishers assigned editors to work with authors to clean up their manuscripts; the print job was set the old way - by humans; the publisher also assisted in publicizing the finished product and offered generous discounts for sizable orders from dealers.

Today, many authors have to find their own editors and proofreaders and present a clean, computer-generated, print-ready, final version to the publisher. Many have to hawk their own work without any assistance from the publishers. I understand that royalties have dwindled drastically. If anyone expects to get rich from the sale of their history book, forget it. Maybe Nora Roberts and James Patterson are living the good life, but...

So what does the future hold for both author and book dealer? Will everything be turned over to technology and Amazon sales? Will bookcases go out of fashion? How does one dog-ear a Kindle page or make notes in the margins? Will the technology versions of books soon rise in costs comparable to wholesale prices of printed works today?