Not the mass-market paperbacks of today, but of yesteryear.

Then take those prices and chart along the ‘official’ inflation rates.

Now of course, when you bought a mass-market paperback in 1962, you were getting a lot more than you get today in an ebook encumbered with DRM and readable only on one device, something you can’t share or resell, something that in all likelihood you won’t even be able to read in 20 years, or maybe 10 years.

I do note a largish sampling of under-a-dollar ebooks on the Kindle store, for example.

Now in addition to considering the retail price of the ebook of today vs the paperback of yore, we should also consider how much in royalties the author of these might be getting. So how would the author’s per-copy royalty on that 25-cent paperback compare with his modern counterpart’s royalty on that 99-cent ebook? And does that chart along with the inflation of the past 50 years?

With all the journalists that the WSJ and other papers are throwing onto the breadlines these days, I suspect that we have yet to see just how ‘low’ authors will be willing to go, just to bring in some extra dollars.