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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Yes. That's true of many products, as is the inverse.
The CPI is a very broad measure of a wide variety of goods. Again, since we are looking at a 40-year period, it should not be surprising in the least that Specific Commodity X may be much lower or higher than the CPI.
E.g. all it would take is a big run-up in any of the costs for a 10 year period, and voila, you've outpaced the CPI. Unless your prices have a reason to decline drastically, you'll stay above that CPI 20 more years down the road.
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Check. You'll see that books have outstripped CPI for virtually any time period you care to pick over that 40 year time span. So it's not some short term anomaly that happened decades ago.
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What commodities would you like to examine? Most non-food items have radically changed since 1970. How about coffee: $0.10 in a shop in 1970 ($0.55 in 2009 dollars). Isn't that same cup at least $1, maybe $1.50? Perhaps $2.50 and up at Starbucks?
And on the other side, the price of rice steadily declined for years (e.g. $550/ton in India in the early 70s down to $200 in 2001), and then went through the roof during the 2007/2008 global food crisis. Or, the lowest-end IBM PS/2 in 1987 (8mhz CPU -- whoooie that's fast!) was $2595, or $4836 in 2009 dollars. The highest-end was $10,895, and in 2009 dollars that's $20,304. Even if we completely disregard factors like CPU speed or HD size, a personal computer was significantly more expensive in 1987 than today -- as we might expect, given its rarity in '87 and ubiquity today.
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THANK YOU!!!! You make my point for me. For all of those examples we can point to something and say, "here's why it's differed from CPI". But, as you keep saying, "the cost of books has nothing to do with the price". So how DO we explain the extraordinary rise of the price of books over 40 years??????
What quibble. My source said the average price of a car in 1970 was $3,900, yours says $3,700, which is close enough for me. Your data stops at 2001, I checked up to 2010, so comparisons are meaningless. I'm assuming "it hasn't changed much since", is just an attempt at humour.
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They are produced faster, the image quality is significantly better (looked at a 70s art book lately?), chain stores barely existed in the 70s, retailers are clambering all over each other to offer free shipping....
It's not the same type of change, but the reality is that almost no non-food commodity has avoided alteration since 1970. (And even food has radically changed, due to subsidies, factory farming, GM, improved yield, globalization....)
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More humour? All along we've been talking about mass market novels and now you toss in art books? Try to stay on topic. I just went to my bookshelf and pulled out a paperback printed in the 70s and compared it to a recent paperback. Guess what? There's no difference! Go figure.
You can't be seriously comparing any kind of change to books to the change in cars over 40 years. Can you?
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Wait, people don't bitch about the price of paper books?!? Who knew? 
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I thought the whole point of this thread was how people bitch more about the price of ebooks than paper books. Did I miss something?