Japan and France to me stand out as places where pop culture-y books are really fairly priced. And both of these are places where there are established printing formats that don't try to make the books huge.
Walking around in an Australian bookstore at least I am still a bit flabbergasted by how everything is printed to be huge, everything a slightly different size, lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.
Not that I think this is a "cost of materials" thing in itself. But it all compounds on itself to where now a bookstore is huge to have just some random nonsense, and people will probably buy 2 instead of 3 books.
I agree that books are probably not "too expensive", I just wish that the mass market paperbacks would be smaller more straightforward and less of a precious little item.
To anyone interested in this stuff and in Tokyo(... well, Saitama), the Kadokawa Culture Museum [0] is ... probably the biggest building commemorating a publishing house in the world? The pictures don't do it justice, the building is ginormous.
But in it there's a bit of a (corporate approved) history of Kadokawa built into the museum. Their core thing that found them success: standardising a small pocketbook format for printing their books, having almost everything print to that size, with the same font etc, and selling it at a low enough price that college students could buy more books than they could ever read.
Printing all your cheap stuff in A6 sizes mean you can have a _loooot_ of books at home before worrying about much.
I can confirm that French paperbacks are in a league of their own, my almost weekly purchases at the French bookstore here in Bucharest are a example of that (never visited Japan, but a French friend of mine who’s also a book rat and who staid in Tokyo for about a year told me about the same you’re saying about them). On the other hand I could never understand the Anglos’ infatuation with a book not being serious enough if it’s not hardback, maybe a reflection of their castle-owning days, when one had enough space to store them. I’m kidding, but only by half.
I’d also want to show my appreciation for Italian publishers, for some of them, at least, the quality of their some of their books can be quite high (Laterza and Einaudi from the top of my head, but there are others, too).
> lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.
Glossy cover lamination is actually cheaper than matte lamination.
If you meant more fancier finishing like spot UV or foil-stamping, ignore what I said.
yeah I was thinking of the foil stamping etc... maybe it just looks fancier to me (and hence why they do it I guess??)
Japanese paperbacks tend to use dust covers instead. Dunno if that's cheaper or not, but it seems like it.