Unfortunately, the prices of many academic publications have become ridiculous. Who’s willing to fork over one hundred euros for two hundred pages? And the delay between a book’s hardcover publication and its (affordable) paperback edition is getting longer and longer. For example, I still haven’t read Lee Broughton’s edited volume titled Critical Perspectives on the Western, published by Rowman & Littlefield two years ago, because there’s no paperback and the hardback costs more than eighty dollars. And now the announced price of Wong’s book is $125 / £85, while its title, Spaghetti Westerns: A Viewer’s Guide, doesn’t at all suggest an academic publication.
Further examples: Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper’s edited collection titled International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier, published by Scarecrow Press four years ago, $107 / £70; Broughton’s Euro-Western, published by I.B. Tauris two years ago, £70 / $115, thanks to Sebastian I got it at a reduced price (I don’t know how they calculate their UK and US prices, but by today’s exchange rate seventy quid are worth approximately ninety-three bucks); Julia Dobson and Jonathan Rayner’s edited volume Mapping Cinematic Norths: International Interpretations in Film and Television, published by Peter Lang two years ago, €61.20 / £45; Emma Hamilton and Alistair Rolls’s edited collection Unbridling the Western Film Auteur: Contemporary, Transnational and Intertextual Explorations, published by Peter Lang this year, €57.10 / £42.
Laudable exceptions: Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads, which was published as a paperback (£24.99) in August 2017, a little over a year after its hardback publication (£75); Thomas Klein, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze’s edited volume titled Crossing Frontiers: Intercultural Perspectives on the Western, published by Schüren in 2012, €24,90.
Interesting Guardian-article on (academic) publishing practices: