Popular Penguins: The Price of Books

Rebecca Starford

Deputy Editor, ABR

How much would you pay for a paperback book?

When Allen Lane, then a director of The Bodley Head, waited on the Exeter station platform in 1935, he was – the story goes – appalled at the selection in the bookstall (the quality of the interior of cheap paperbacks tended to replicate their exterior). Lane believed that high-quality contemporary fiction should be made available to all readers and sold at a reasonable price, not just in traditional bookshops but also in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores.

The first Penguin paperbacks appeared that same year, and included works by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were colour-coded (orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime). They cost sixpence, the same price then as a packet of cigarettes. Penguin became a separate company in 1936 and within twelve months it had sold three million paperbacks.

To celebrate this extraordinary publishing story, Penguin will release in September fifty ‘Popular Penguins’ titles. The authors range from Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde. Maintaining Allen Lane’s ethos of making great writing affordable, the Popular Penguins retail at $10. That’s cheaper, today, than a packet of cigarettes.

It is a smart move on Penguin’s behalf to relaunch these titles. The publisher has undertaken a massive marketing campaign promoting the series. The selection of titles is strong – and eclectic. Many are indeed ‘popular’ in their mass, enduring appeal, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. There are the edgier novels of Donna Tartt (The Secret History) and Alex Garland (The Beach). There is also a solid selection of non-fiction – Geoffrey Robertson’s Crimes against Humanity is there – along with the philosophical tomes of Michel Foucault and Alain de Botton.

Most paperbacks retail in Australian bookshops for between $20 and $40, the price range for main courses in most restaurants, or a new-release DVD. A trade paperback version of The Beach, for example, is selling at Readings and Gleebooks, two of the country’s leading independent bookshops, for $22.95. To compare, you can buy a copy of The Beach today on Amazon.com for $3.70, plus postage.

Increasingly, both independent and chain bookshops are competing with on-line booksellers such as the ubiquitous Amazon. This is nothing new. It is worrying, however, when a monopoly begins to emerge. AbeBooks.com, a reputable Canadian-based on-line bookshop, which linked second-hand booksellers across the world, was recently sold to Amazon. The chief executive of AbeBooks promises, ambiguously, on their website that the deal with Amazon will offer customers ‘a great deal’.

‘A great deal’ – what does that mean? Certainly, it will be cheaper to purchase second-hand books through Amazon, but what does this do for consumer diversity and price regulation. In Australia, especially, shipping costs factor into all on-line purchases. But to have access to books that are neither reviewed nor distributed in this country – and don’t kid yourself that these are obscure titles, either – it is a small price to pay to counter the tyranny of distance.

It seems to me that in relaunching the Popular Penguins series, the publisher has their finger on the consumer pulse. While apparently reacting to the on-line boom, Penguin is tapping into the traditional (dare I say, old-fashioned) activity of book-buying. There are many people out there who are still reluctant to buy their books on-line. Not as democratic as Allen Lane’s original vision (don’t expect vendors at Flinders Street Station to be selling Noam Chomsky any time soon), Popular Penguins will be conspicuously unavailable on-line – they will be sold at bookshops! At the same time, Penguin will be filling the niche of the ‘middle-market’: cheap, utilitarian, no-frills publications.

In a time of economic stress, to be able to go into a bookshop and buy Pride and Prejudice for less than a cinema ticket, a double-vodka and raspberry, or a toasted sandwich: now that is something to celebrate.