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Books are not too expensive
151–160 of 216 posts
Re: Books are not too expensive
#152It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. But for the price conscious general reader just inter-library loan. If you want to buy To Kill A Mockingbird or The Hobbit be my guest, but any library in the US would have a few copies of those. Public libraries are awesome. Use it or lose it.
AFAICT, publishers don't donate books to public libraries. Those public libraries use our taxes to buy books. So if books are expensive then our taxes buy fewer books. San Francisco public libraries spend $200m per year, of which 15% is spent on 'collections', including books, ebooks, magazines etc. That's $35 per resident. The denominator includes newborns, infants and others that can't read or don't like to read.
Libraries also do a lot more than just provide books. $35 per resident per year for everything that libraries do provide is forking cheap, and we would be greatly impoverished if they were to disappear.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#153I tend to get an average of 5 hours of enjoyment while reading a novel book, usually divided into about 10 thirty minute sessions.
I read an average of 50 books a year, so I spend about 250 hours a year reading. I usually spend between $10-$35 on a book, so I will spend between $500-$1,750 on books in a year. This comes out to $2-$7 per hour of entertainment.
This price range is a premium price range for home entertainment, but not absurd. For that premium price I get a lot of objectively good benefits associated with reading such as increased vocabulary and improved attention span.
If I found the price to be higher than my entertainment budget, I would have other options such as using a cheaper e-reader option, selling old books, or using a local library. Reading can be as cheap as you want it to be, or it can be a very expensive hobby if you start chasing first editions and author signatures.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this! I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (…
It only works because the educators are complicit. Most bachelors degree textbooks in basic sciences do not need to change from one decade to the next. My Lorrain and Corson Electromagnetic Fields and Waves from when I was studying applied physics in 1975 is just as correct now as it was then.
They aren't complicit when the cheap edition isn't reprinted and instead it's "2nd, 3rd, revised" etc.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#155Using a 1960s book as a benchmark feels weird to me. I'd expect books to be more expensive when they come out and less expensive when they're the fiftieth low-cost reprint 60 years later. Sure, it's a classic, but it's hardly a "must-have". At best, it's something you need to read for school, although many school districts have dropped it from their lists. Having said that, I think the complaints about book prices ar…
The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.
Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typical example of that good today, without digging into the details, because the typical example today is often a lot worse-made but in ways that aren't apparent just from looking at a wide-shot image of the two things. Often it takes destructive tear-downs to really get at the differences (as it would to do a deep comparison of book binding quality) if you don't have access to watch the manufacturing processes directly.
Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.
(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)
Re: Books are not too expensive
#156It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. But for the price conscious general reader just inter-library loan. If you want to buy To Kill A Mockingbird or The Hobbit be my guest, but any library in the US would have a few copies of those. Public libraries are awesome. Use it or lose it.
AFAICT, publishers don't donate books to public libraries. Those public libraries use our taxes to buy books. So if books are expensive then our taxes buy fewer books. San Francisco public libraries spend $200m per year, of which 15% is spent on 'collections', including books, ebooks, magazines etc. That's $35 per resident. The denominator includes newborns, infants and others that can't read or don't like to read.
>That's $35 per resident.
Seems like good value to me.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#157It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. But for the price conscious general reader just inter-library loan. If you want to buy To Kill A Mockingbird or The Hobbit be my guest, but any library in the US would have a few copies of those. Public libraries are awesome. Use it or lose it.
> It's nice to own books. Read them multiple times, dog-ear the pages, scribble in the margins, risk reading them in the pool. Responding to the dead child comment: that's what common paperbacks are for. Don't don't mess up a nice hardcover or anything rare.
I cringe watching my daughter dogear her books. It hurts me deep in my soul to see her nice books damaged that way.
But objectively my reaction is wrong. Books are not mystical objects to be revered. They are objects to be used. Nearly all books end up in a landfill or recycled eventually. What does it actually matter if they end up there covered in annotations and filled with dog eared pages?
Books you have borrowed? Absolutely do not write in them or dogear pages. Books you intend to share with others? Generally the same. Rare books or valuable books? Of course. Normal books you got on Amazon or from your local bookstore that you use only for your personal enjoyment? Use them how you want.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the textbook cartel is outrageous. I started a textbook publishing company to fight this! I was working on web copy describing how crazy the mainstream textbook prices are, and used the price C$300 for the calculus book, trying to be flippant (to exaggerate the competitor price to make my prices look better). I decided to check the price in the bookstore, and to my surprise the price was even higher than that! (…
Well someone sat down and wrote a 1000 dense pages that probably took 2-5 years of their life. That deserves to be rewarded. Of course there are problems with professors prescribing their own books for the class etc. but when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
> when I went to school you could return that $300 book for $200 to the bookstore once the semester was done.
This is not my recollection at all. My recollection was that I could buy a book for $300 and sell it back for $75 if it was in great condition. And I could only do that about half the time because version N+1 would make my copy obsolete.
Re: Books are not too expensive
#159Not many people have mentioned used books. I bought 4 books for something like $20 the other day. You can't beat that.
Hitting an estate sale and lucking into someone whose tastes run similar to one's own can get a person whole libraries for cents per book. It's the kind of thing a certain kind of reader can dabble at for a few months one lazy year early in life, then stop and never do it again because they've accumulated a lifetime or more of good reading material for the cost of a very-few dinner-n-a-movie evenings.
(This is where many used book stores get the bulk of their stock, aside from, these days, buying out other used book stores that are closing)
Re: Books are not too expensive
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its not standard, but its widely used because it is more comparable between companies as it removes the impact of interest (and therefore capital structure) and depreciation (which can reflect different histories). The standardised measures can be manipulated too.
Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar. But the article applies it across industries, where those assumptions break down. This makes no sense. The article called it a 'standard profit metric'. It is a metric, but it doesn't measure profit (as it ignores capitalized costs) and it isn't standard.
> Sure, EBITDA is useful for comparing operating performance between companies in a single industry, where capital structures and asset bases are broadly similar.
The whole point of EBITDA is, as I said, to eliminate the effect of capital structures.
EBITDA margin is not meaningful between dissimilar industries. I am not sure what would be best. Some sort of return on investment measure.
I think calling it a profit measure is fine.