I came across a reference to this book at marxmail in a post on a seminar of Engels’ Anti-Duhring (which we will discuss anon).
I would be more than happy/willing to read this book but going to Amazon I see that the hardback costs $125 and the Kindle $40. Beyond belief. How can leftists allow themselves to be caught in this racket, if that is what it is.
Needless to say, this is a book that I will never read, save perhaps snippets at Google Books, maybe.

I cannot fathom what exactly is happening here, nor whether my impression is correct that these inflated prices seemed designed to torpedo books on the left although that could be paranoia on my part (these publishers might suspect poor sales of leftist books, and inflate prices to make money selling to libraries).
The whole racket is useless and such prices a real challenge to the left to find a way to communicate, a task not possible in the current publishing world, it seems.
I have produced five books on issues of socialism, communism and history, and all in free versions on the internet, most also with Kindle and paperbacks, discounted. Obviously they don’t sell but they do get readers of the free versions with slow but steady downloads day after day in numbers that add up in a year to the thousands. With no ad budget and the heavy cancel culture of Marxist stalinists, that’s actually success. Face reality: books on the left are a capitalist enterprise, if published by Verso. Selfpublished books lack the snob appeal of academic or ‘published’ credentialization which means they can’t be reviewed, discussed or acknowledged to exist. In twenty years of writing on the left I have been banned from Marxmail, deprived of any ‘comrades’ on the left who immediately cross the street (fortunately), and never had a discussion with a Marxist, who will terminate discussion at once. These people think they will produce socialism, but I fear at best a dictatorship of the Marxist bourgeoisie. However, someone gets the last laugh. I doubt if the older left(s) of the Marxist type can make a difference any more, exempting the many activist placard groups in climate, ecological and faux-socialism. More power to them, but they lack the thrust of a really viable left, which should be revolutionary/reformist but not reformist/revolutionary. However they may have to carry the day.
In any case, writers on the left need to consider the pocket change issues of the working class they claim to represent and not sell books for such ridiculous prices.
The world of self-publishing is creating its own revolution: once reviled by the peer review squads of science and academe they are slowly undermining the standard book publishing world and creating a situation on the left where the only book that can matter is one you can get for free. This almost happened with Google books, but the author world rose in revolt. But the day is coming when the books will be mostly free, or at lest with free versions, and this should have happened yesterday on the left.