Some of this is economies of scale. It's fairly cheap per unit to print 1,000,000 copies of a book. It's much more expensive (again, per unit) to print 1,000 co

Some of this is economies of scale. It's fairly cheap per unit to print 1,000,000 copies of a book. It's much more expensive (again, per unit) to print 1,000 copies. Books like Lord of the Rings which are guaranteed to sell a large number of copies are much less of a risk to print large numbers of than books like Concrete Mathematics. The publisher rolls that expectation into the retail price. Additionally, all one-off production costs (like paying an artist for cover art) are rolled into that retail price also, with the expectation that X number of copies will sell over the "initial life" of the book. That "initial life" is usually the first year of a book's publication.