Regular readers will know very well of my distaste for book piracy. I'm not going to rant about that right now. Nor am I going to blast holes in the feeble justifications some people put forward in its defence. No, it's just the springboard for tonight's musings. An acquaintance with whom I was discussing the subject (well, actually ranting and raving at them) said that he steals books in this way because "books are too expensive". After presenting my usual "you wouldn't steal a car, etc." arguments I called him several rude names and left.
But I thought about what he'd said. Books being expensive. And I checked out some prices of the sort of books he reads. Mainstream thrillers mostly. And to be quite frank it's total bollocks. Books are not expensive. Not here in the developed world. Books are cheap. Sometimes incredibly cheap. Ok - some of the books I read (lesbian fiction) aren't as cheap as others (mass-market paperback fantasy). But they're still a pretty good bargain. Know how I know this?? I did some working out.
I started with those Dickens books I found a few weeks ago. They were a matched set of hardbacks from the 1920s. They weren't a particularly classy set. Just the sort of cheap hardback reprints that publishers used to put out in the days before paperbacks were a big thing. I did some research. Back when they were printed a new, bestseller-type hardback cost between 7/6d (about 38p in today's money) and 10/- (50p). This set weren't that posh. They were the 3/6d cheap editions. That's just under 18p. The average weekly wage for a skilled labourer was about £4. A 10/- book would have cost one-eighth of his weekly wage (his because a)women weren't labourers and b) were paid less than two-thirds of a man's wage). The 3/6d editions were about 1/22nd of the weekly wage. For comparison a two-pound (just under 1kg) loaf of bread cost 2.5d (1p) and a one-bed bungalow cost around £650.
The average labourer's weekly wage today is around £300. An 800g loaf of bread is about 75p. A one-bed bungalow here costs about £275,000. And a mass-market paperback costs around £8 with a new hardback novel coming in at £20. The hardback costs one-fifteenth of the weekly wage. (A lot less if you buy somewhere that heavily discounts, such as Amazon). The paperback costs less than one thirty-seventh of the wage.
What's really expensive is the house price!! Gone up from just over three times the wage to over seventeen times the wage.
See. Books are cheap.
So... if you're looking to buy your friends and relatives a Christmas/Hanukkah/Solstice/Eid/Kwanzaa/whatever you celebrate present. Why not buy a book?? Or several books. Why not buy books for everybody you know?? They'll think you've bought them something expensive, but you'll know it was cheap. Because I said so.
See you next week. Happy reading. Goodnight and may your God/s go with you.
Ze
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