"As a retailer, assuming that all other things are different, you’re making a greater profit on your $3.99 books than you are on your $2.99 books." Not quite true in our case. We have had a harder time moving the Marvel Now books, so we often will make them weekly "specials" with a larger discount. For us, the $3.99 DC books sell better than the $3.99 Marvel books, so price is not the sole sales factor. As others have mentioned, there is a perception that the DC books use better materials.

You are overthinking what I said there. Let’s look at it again.

For the ease of math, let’s assume that your discount gets you your books at 50%. So you’re paying $2.00 for the $3.99 books and $1.50 for the $2.99 books, more or less, and each copy sold nets you the same amount in profit. By selling a single $3.99 title, you are putting more money into your pocket than by selling a single $2.99 title. That is inarguable.

There are plenty of other considerations that factor into the value-for-money perceptions of your clients, I agree. And those preferences will be different from place to place, and may affect how individual titles at any price and from any company may perform in your store. But the economics of the situation as I outlined them remain the same. A $3.99 book is more profitable on a per-copy basis than a $2.99 title—on a 3:4 basis (meaning you need to sell 4 $2.99 copies to bring in the same amount of profit as selling 3 $3.99 titles. Or, multiplied by hundreds, 400 copies at $2.99 to equal 300 copies at $3.99.)