What are the true costs of academic publishing?
Well, while academic publisher DeGruyter charges £158 for the book “The Leopard in the Garden” my local bookshop and other bookshops charge £39 for exactly the same book (and £12 for the ebook, which DeGruyter costs at a cool £158 too). The same appears true for other books (e.g., Nothing Less Than Equality £181 at DeGruyter vs. £24 at bookshops). Maybe this is a licensing thing, but it just seems odd?
The large academic publishing companies argue that their hefty fees e.g., £10.000 to get a paper in Nature published as open access, are warranted by the infrastructure and editor service they provide. When one knows very little about publishing, those claims are hard to evaluate because there are few non-profit equivalents that are fully comparable. But here the comparison is for profit bookshop vs for profit publishers and the books are exactly the same.