It was my birthday recently. I turned 29. I could expound on the experience, wax poetic with morbid images of my own encroaching mortality. I could babble on about how I only have a year left to get a tattoo and piercing before it becomes a laughable sign of mid-life-crisis. But I'm not going to, something happened the day after my birthday that brings to mind only one sentence.
Books are [insert your favorite expletive here] expensive!
I'm what you'd call a big reader, but I purchase reading material, both for myself and my daughters, at one of three places: either at the school book fair which only charges half price for the books, at second hand book shops selling previously read book, or at amazon-dot-com where I can run a search for the particular book I'm looking for and buy it at a pretty good discount, like those catalog book clubs with their club prices. So when my father in law gave me a gift certificate for Borders, I was thrilled that I could actually physically browse through an entire store of books to buy a brand new one for MYSELF! A truly momentous occasion, little did I know how expensive books had become.
The last time I had browsed through a new book book store, the average price of a hardcover book was between 14 and 17 dollars. Still even then it was preferable to check and see if they had it in paperback, being a teen who made part time minimum wage and a pair of jeans or a bag full of makeup was a wiser way to spend 20 bucks. Things are much different now.
After a few hours browsing around, I stumbled across a book that I had been waiting to see available, the last of a trilogy continuation of the movie Willow.. My chin replete with drool, I picked it up and saw that it was going for 30 bucks. Another hour searching for a paperback version, I came up empty handed. Despite the fact that I could have gotten a few paperback titles instead to leave the store with a purchase necessitating a bag, I forked over the cash for just the one. A good book is a priceless commodity and a good story even more valuable.
Having seen the reality of astronomical book prices with my own eyes, I can only applaud those places and people who afford us the opportunity to purchase books at discount prices. Reading and good fiction or fantasy is a subject very close to my heart and while I adore movies such as The Dark Crystal, Legend and Labyrinth, have the tapes and force my children to watch them over and over until they're begging to go clean their room, there is nothing in this world like books. The exercise of the imagination required to read a tale, the rambling bardic sagas and the very act of holding a book in the hands is something beyond my capacity to describe.
If a person can read and comprehend, there is no end to what that person can learn or experience in their minds eye. Just the very concept that symbols called letters can be grouped together into something called words, these words arranged in just the right sequence, can transport ones awareness into a world they never could have imagined on their own is something about our culture that gives much more than it takes. Probably the only thing I can imagine in any society that achieves that.
I can bitch about paying thirty dollars for a book, but its still worth it, to me. I would have reason to bitch if all books everywhere always cost thirty bucks a pop, if there were no paperbacks that we just have to wait a little bit longer for than what we wait for the hardcover (yes I'm impatient) then I would have ground to bitch on. The very fact that there are book fairs in schools where children can buy a book for half price, and that there are the (although too infrequent) shops where one can buy used books, lets me bitch only about my own impatience and inability to NOT spend money when I have it.
More people need to search out the bargains and sit on their hands rather than let their money burn a hole in their pockets. Rather than paying through the nose for any products, not just books, gives them the chance to buy two or three books rather than just the one. We all know what we want (or we should slow down and figure that out) but we should also know how to find it for less but we should never, never, pass completely on something as wonderful as a good story for there's nothing finer in all the world.