Japan and France to me stand out as places where pop culture-y books are really fairly priced. And both of these are places where there are established printing formats that don't try to make the books huge.

Walking around in an Australian bookstore at least I am still a bit flabbergasted by how everything is printed to be huge, everything a slightly different size, lots of paperbacks with glossy covers etc.

Not that I think this is a "cost of materials" thing in itself. But it all compounds on itself to where now a bookstore is huge to have just some random nonsense, and people will probably buy 2 instead of 3 books.

I agree that books are probably not "too expensive", I just wish that the mass market paperbacks would be smaller more straightforward and less of a precious little item.

To anyone interested in this stuff and in Tokyo(... well, Saitama), the Kadokawa Culture Museum [0] is ... probably the biggest building commemorating a publishing house in the world? The pictures don't do it justice, the building is ginormous.

But in it there's a bit of a (corporate approved) history of Kadokawa built into the museum. Their core thing that found them success: standardising a small pocketbook format for printing their books, having almost everything print to that size, with the same font etc, and selling it at a low enough price that college students could buy more books than they could ever read.

Printing all your cheap stuff in A6 sizes mean you can have a _loooot_ of books at home before worrying about much.

[0]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G5U9S1dit2KJvEQVA