There are many aspects to this answer, which this FAQ will cover in detail, but the short answer is, "To remain competitive in the homeschool science curriculum space, we must." It should be noted that many curriculum companies have switched, and are switching, to soft cover books because they are far less expensive to print. Additionally, since the economic catastrophe that was the COVID-19 response, printing costs have increased by at least 20%, and unfortunately that appears to not be a temporary situation as even though supply chains are almost back to their pre-COVID days, prices have not come down...they have stopped going up, but that isn't the same as absorbing a sustained 20% to 30% increase in costs of printing (and this recent rapid increase followed a period of relative cost stability of over a decade). Printing costs are figured on a click-by-click basis, so that the more you print at once, the less it is per book to print. Science Shepherd is a small, family-owned business and we print far less at a time that our much larger major competitors, meaning that our per-book print cost is already higher because of our smaller printing batches. Additionally, and I can't emphasize this point enough, we print 100% of our books in the United States. We always have and always will. None of our competitors do that, and it results in a substantial per-book premium for us. Any of you who primarily source materials or manufactured items from outside the US know how much cheaper virtually everything is from outside the US. And yet, despite our materials being far more expensive to print, our prices are consistently at or below those of our competitors. We remain dedicated to bringing you the highest quality books, printed ONLY in the USA and hope that you can understand the myriad reasons that factor into the change from hard to soft cover.