There's a market for high-end, luxury books

How much would you pay for a book?

Not for a rare book, a Shakespeare folio or a Gutenberg Bible to keep under glass, but for a volume simply to grace your bookshelves or your coffee table.

Would $199 be too much? Sports artist Dick Perez hopes that 5,000 people are willing to put out that amount for The Immortals, a collection of his portraits of Baseball Hall of Famers.

What about $461.62? That's what online bookseller Amazon is asking for Microsoft executive-turned-chef Nathan Myhrvold's new, six-volume culinary compendium Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.

How about $15,000, the publisher's list price for the "Champ's Edition" of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Greatest of All Time), featuring more than 3,000 images, plus a small sculpture by Jeff Koons and four silver gelatin prints signed by photographer Howard L. Bingham and Ali? Or $4,500 for the "Collector's Edition," with a Koons photo-litho instead of the sculpture and without the silver gelatin prints?.

In an era when the popularity of e-books has exploded and hardcover volumes seem destined to go the way of the LP, high-priced books are holding on.

"Expensive coffee-table books are not facing the same pressures as other books," says Lynn Andriani, a senior editor for the trade journal Publishers Weekly. "The expensive books keep coming."

That's because e-books don't satisfy a book lover's yen for "that really nice special edition," explains her colleague, PW features editor Andrew R. Albanese.

Beauty sells, and costly books are all about beauty, usually in the form of art or photography. The book itself becomes a piece of art, "something tactile, that you can hold and feel and see the quality of," says Creed Poulson, public-relations manager for the American subsidiary of the German firm Taschen. Taschen publishes GOAT and other high-end books, including a "Collector's Edition" of Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs that comes in a clamshell box, is signed by Paul McCartney, and sells for $1,000. (The trade edition, not signed by Paul, is $69.99).