Nearly 20 years on, our books cost less. Here's why that matters.

These school holidays I found myself having the same conversation over and over — with friends, with colleagues, with family. About prices. About how expensive everything has become. About how heavy life feels right now.

I don't think I'm alone in that.

So it felt like a strange kind of coincidence when, visiting my parents over the break, I came across one of our old catalogues. Super Cheap Books (or Social Club Books in our earlier days) has been around for over 40 years — my parents Ruth and Ken built it — and every now and then something surfaces from the archive that stops you in your tracks.

This was one of those moments.

What the catalogue said

The catalogue was from 2008 — I was working with my parents at the time. Nearly 20 years ago. And there, on the page, was a 10-book collection priced at $40.

Today, our 10-book collections are $30 to $35.

I sat with that for a moment. In a world where a coffee costs $6 and a weekly grocery shop barely looks the same as it did even two years ago, we are selling quality children's picture books for less than we charged in 2008. Around $3 per book — and in many cases, less than we charged nearly two decades ago.

How is that possible?

It's a fair question. The honest answer is that the business has changed significantly over the years. When my parents started SCB, we had sales reps across the country leaving books in people's offices and printed a couple of 16-page catalogues per year, with all the overheads that came with it — warehousing, print runs, postage at scale. Over time the business evolved. We moved online. We streamlined. 

But the other part of the answer is simpler: we've never treated price as an afterthought. From the beginning, the whole point of Super Cheap Books was that quality children's books should be accessible — not just to well-resourced centres with generous budgets, but to every early childhood setting, regardless of what they can spend.

It's the reason the business exists. Books matter, and access to books is essential.

Why the price point matters

There's a difference between a book that lives on a centre's shelf and a book a child gets to take home and keep.

At $3 per book, centres can do both. They can stock their reading corners and quiet spaces, and they can give every child in their care a book to call their own — to bring home, to read with a parent or carer, to return to again and again.

The research on early literacy is clear: access to books at home is one of the strongest predictors of reading development. Children who grow up with books do better with reading. And children who receive a book as a gift — something chosen for them, something that belongs to them — develop a relationship with books that sticks.

This is what we think about when we source books. Not just whether they're good — though they have to be good — but whether they're the kind of book a child will want to read more than once. The kind that gets worn at the corners.

If you're looking for a place to start, our most popular packs are a good guide to what educators keep reordering — and what children actually reach for.