Our favorite Italian restaurant recently sent us a note with the news that truffle season was upon us once again and we might consider coming in for a few grams of the freshly shaved fungi on our pasta, for a princely supplemental increment of $60 a garnish. Seems reasonable, in a way, when I discover that white Alba truffles are up at $3000 a pound this season.

Which brings me to book pricing. Why do we sell books as if they were potatoes when many of them are actually more like truffles? When something is generic and fungible (which has nothing to do with fungi — I looked it up so you don’t have to), supply and demand determines the price. Hard coal, everyday sea salt, water, topsoil. They go for the same price, everywhere, because it’s all the same.

And that’s about where we are with book pricing right now. Because books, on the surface, tend to resemble each other — paper with ink on the inside, covers and a spine on the outside — publishers tend to price them as if they were all hardly more differentiated than branded topsoil. But I’ll bet that for the avid reader of romance novels, Nora Roberts and Diane Palmer are not interchangeable. Fiction readers are addicted to the author, not the just the genre. Yet we price fiction as if it’s generic.

What about non-fiction books that we urgently need? Someone in your family becomes ill with Kukla Fran & Ollie syndrome that the doctor can’t take the time to fully explain. What do you do? You rush out and buy the very best book you can find about the rare disease. Do you carefully compare prices on all the books that address the issue while your loved one hovers between life and death? I doubt it. You look for the publication date, the credibility of the author, the quality of the review and endorsements. And you buy it, whether it’s priced at $9.95, $24.95 or maybe even $49.95.

Salespeople buy, on average, seven books a year. Salespeople face tough challenges every single day, and the good ones are constantly seeking ways to increase their productivity. A great sales book that really changes the effectiveness of a salesperson can be a genuine goldmine for the reader. To the right salesperson, the right book might mean an additional income of $100,000 dollars a year, or much more. And many sales books are worthless. Can you explain to me why both the valuable and worthless might carry the same retail price of $16.95?

Maybe one reason publishers price their books as if they were commodities, when in fact they are anything but, is because they fear they aren’t able to present a persuasive case for the true value of their books. “It may be worth $50 or $100, but if we put that kind of a price on it, no one would even pick it up.” And that’s true, if we don’t know who the author is, if the endorsements aren’t convincing, if the tidbits on the back cover aren’t irresistible.

When I was starting my publishing consulting business fifteen years ago, I was living in Aspen, and my nearest great book store was The Tattered Cover in Denver. When I finally got a chance to get to the store to see what kind of help I could find for launching my business, I discovered a pile of slipcased shrink-wrapped double notebooks called The Complete Marketing Handbook for Consultants, by Don M. Schrello. The price was $235. I took the liberty of slitting the shrink-wrapping and sampled the notebooks. I found letter forms, contracts, pricing guidelines, legal and strategy guides — everything I needed to start my business. I bought the set and used it as my guide. What was the real value of Schrello’s book to me? Much more than $235.

If we can’t figure out ways to convince our prospective book buyers of the unique value of our books, we will be inclined to take the easy route, treat our books as commodities and price them as such. But when publishers get the courage to examine what they really are worth to the audience that needs or wants them, publishers can then price based on value. It took Scholastic a while to catch on, but look what happened when they finally realized they had addicted several millions kids (okay, and some adults, too) to Harry Potter. The first three hardcovers were priced at $24.95. By book four,Goblet of Fire, Scholastic screwed their courage up a little and raised the price to $29.99. You can just imagine the fretting around that conference table when that risk was taken. Someone — come on, you know who you are — surely said, “If we price it that high, we’ll kill our sales.” Riiiight. And then, for the final book, which could have been priced as high as an Xbox, it came out at a courageous $34.99. Now I realize that the retail price was hammered by Amazon, but the point is — the publisher gets paid on the wholesale price no matter how idiotic Amazon wants to be.

How can publishing move toward value pricing? It may start when an editor or publisher decides they’re willing to experiment in order to find what the true value is for three or four night’s joy curled up with a favorite author. Or when a publisher chooses to take the time and calibrate carefully what the right information is worth to someone who’s career, health, or marriage depends on it. Two years with Dr. Krausenheimer over here or two weeks with this little book. Your choice.

You’ll have to excuse me for a moment.

“Ah, waiter! Could you shave a little more of that truffle on our pasta?”

Yes, I know it’s outrageously expensive. But it’s worth it.

If you read the N.Y.Times in its coverage of the disruption of the Kindle, you might think that publishers are losing a fortune from the sudden rise in Kindle sales.

Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they’re paying for physical books. And Amazon is sticking with its policy to sell Kindle books at no more than $9.99. So take your average $20 list price hardcover book (if I were a shameless self-promoter, I would use my book The Genius Machine as an example, since it also has a list price of $20. But I will resist the temptation.) The publisher sells it to Amazon for 50% off, or $10. Amazon could sell my the book for $20, but they discount it down to $13.57, and make a profit of $3.57, or maybe a little less if Amazon is paying for shipping.

Now take the same book sold as a Kindle. Amazon pays $10 for those rights, too. And Amazon sells the download for $9.99, thereby earning a gross profit of 1¢ on each copy. On books that wholesale for more than $9.99, Amazon seems to be locked into a loss with every sale.

And what about the publisher? On a $20 retail book they get the same $10 for the Kindle edition as they did for the actual hardcover that cost them some $2.00 to manufacture, ship, and even keep a reserve for returns of unsold books. So who is making a killing on the Kindle? The publishers. And Publishers, please, if I’m wrong about these numbers, share the facts with us in the comments below.

Publishers are worried that Amazon will choose to stop losing money on Kindle sales at some point. They are just waiting for that shoe to drop. Hence the cheering for Barnes & Noble’s new reader, Nook. (Nook. Interesting name. Just asking, but what would you call a diminuitive version of the Nook?) Publishers are beyond eager for someone, anyone, to stop Amazon from completely owning ebooks!

Now let’s talk about those ten books that Wal-Mart and Target are offering for pre-orders at $8.99 and Amazon at $9.00. These are for hardcover books ranging in list price from Linda Howard’s Ice at $22 all the way up to Stephen King’s 1088 page monster Under the Dome that lists for a mighty $35. What is the meaning, if any, in these door-busting discounts?

Comes now (“Comes now” is a locution reserved for columnists who can’t find a better way to introduce a new character into a story. But I digress.) Motoko “Cassandra” Rich of the N.Y. Times in her “Price War” story in last Saturday’s paper, wherein she worries that Wal-Mart selling some pro-orders for books as a loss-leader will somehow “fundamentally damage the industry and the ability of future authors to write or publish books.” And, once more, end publishing as we know it.

To tell her story, Ms. Rich interviews bestselling author James Patterson, who she was apparently grateful to reach before her deadline, since she quotes him at length no matter how little light he has to shed upon the subject. Frankly, interviewing an author about retail price discounting is akin to interviewing a tuna about the price of a Salade Niçoise.

The fact is, publishers don’t really care what a retailer sells a book for. Retailers want to take a loss? No problem. What everyone needs to be concerned about, though, is when a Wal-Mart or Amazon pressures a publisher to sell at what is known as a “deep-discount.” That should set off alarms for authors and agents, since most author agreements call for author royalties to take a severe hit when the publisher sells at a deep discount.

Authors: Read your contracts! Find that “Deep Discount” clause. Does it say something to the effect that when the publisher sells your book for more than a 50% discount, the author royalty suddenly gets cut in half? Think about that. The publisher gives Barnes & Noble an extra 1% discount and you lose half your royalties on every book sold.

The big take-away here is that nine of the ten books being hacked down in price by Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart are fiction titles. Only one calls itself non-fiction. And this is the clue to smart book pricing. Fiction is generally sold as entertainment. Entertainment tends to be more fungible. Non-fiction is generally sold on the value of the information it contains. So pricing the two in the same way seems crazy.

How much would you pay for information that can change your life? Heal a child? Save your business? Is that information worth only $20? Is that all you’d pay for it?

We haven’t begun to touch value pricing for non-fiction. That is the real gold mine just waiting for publishers. We’ll write more about the potential and the theory of value pricing soon.

In the meantime, you have to wonder about the one non-fiction title that’s being treated just like all those other nine fiction titles being deep discounted. Yes, it’s Sarah Palin’s memoir. Now, if what she were about to disclose had great value, say information that could, in some way, save the Union, it certainly would be worth a lot. Some of us would pay real money for that kind of knowledge.

But Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon say we can have it all for just $8.99. Maybe they know something.