Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Stupid Expensive

The other day I was wandering around a bookshop and saw something quite shocking. Among a display of Harry Potter books was an audio book version of the final book. The first thing that shocked me was the size of the thing. It was 20 CDs long. A slight shock, but nothing too major. The thing that made me exclaim out loud and get some funny looks from one of the other customers was the price tag. 18000 yen. That's around A$180. This seems to be a stupidly high amount to pay for something like this. It makes me wonder just why the price is so high. The materials are obviously not that expensive. Blank CDs are a buck a piece retail if you want to pay a lot, so I'm sure they can get them for a lot cheaper than that. There's no extra time in writing it, so the author doesn't need to get a larger cut. That I guess leaves the reader and production costs. Harry Potter does have a big name reader, Stephen Fry, but surely he's not getting all of the extra cash. Production and studio time could add more, but surely not a huge amount. It's not like the producer has to do much, just edit out any coughing fits or hiccups.

Anyway, in conclusion, I believe that audio books are ridiculously overpriced.

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Writing time: 53 minutes (I got distracted)
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