Why might this graphic novel be so expensive?

Cafe Society
1

I was looking at buying a softcover copy of the Batman and Wonder Woman graphic novel “Hiketeia” and there are only a few copies available on Amazon and none are cheaper than $70. There’s even one priced over $1,000. What would explain this kind of price? Was it a limited edition or something?

2

The cover alone likely caters to a particular and enthusiastic market niche.

3

It seems to be popular and out of print.

4

Volume 1 of Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman run is $24.99. Hiketia is the first story in it. The rest of the stories are pretty damn good as well. I believe volume 2 is out in July.

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5

Thanks!

6

Those copies that are available for $70 or more on Amazon? A key feature is that they are available. As in, nobody has yet been willing to pay that price. Maybe someone will come along willing to pay that price–or maybe the seller will eventually give in and lower it to something someone is willing to pay. (As for the very high-priced copies, I won’t try to reinvent the wheel in explaining.)

There have been OOP books that I’ve wanted in the past and kept an eye out for good prices on copies on Amazon. Sometimes a copy would show up for much less than the asking prices of the other sellers, and I would buy it. So the cheap copies have a short half-life and the expensive ones continue to sit there unsold until either the seller gets a clue or the sun burns out.

7

Abe Books seems to have plenty for much cheaper.

8

Thanks, man. I knew there had to be something going haywire. I recall several years ago trying to buy a perfectly ordinary, but not very popular and therefore not widely available, book, and noticed some reasonably priced copies and some ridiculously priced ones. I wrote to one of the sellers asking why this copy was so expensive and got some mumbo-jumbo about we price our books competitively. It was like he didn’t even actually look at what he was selling and see that the price was silly, even after I asked about it.

9

Here’s another example–there was once a book that I bought while it was in print and it ended up water-damaged and mildewy. When I went to look about a replacement copy, I found that it was OOP and that 3rd party copies were selling for multiples of the cover price. So I set it aside, checking in every once in a while when it crossed my mind to see if a better price showed up, and eventually somebody had something like a dozen or two copies for at or below the list price (must have come across an overstock sale or something.) Looking at that book now, note the prices-- 50ish, 60ish, above 100, above 200, above 300–then one copy for $11.00. The next time someone goes looking for a copy of that book, the sanely priced $11.00 copy will be gone and the stupidly priced ones will remain. There is some chance someone might be enthused enough to pick up one of the 50 to 60 dollar copies, but I’m pretty sure that nobody will ever pay the 100+ prices.