What is the “social value” of a book?
Marginal Revolution guest blogger Steve Landsburg has a depressing answer:
Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So the market price of an orange is an excellent reflection of its true social value, whereas the bulk of Dan Brown’s $20 million is only an excellent reflection of what he was able to divert from some
other author to himself.
Sadly, I think he’s right to a certain extent. We live in a world already saturated with media-generated demands on our time. And I’ll admit, as much as it pains me to, that there are already too many books in the world that I’m interested in for me to read in one lifetime.
But this fact reminds me of and underscores a thought I had about the internet I first had back in the late 90’s. At some point I realized that my internet is not the same as your internet. Or anyone else’s internet. You have a number of sites that you read on a regular or semi-regular basis; you have your ideas of what sites are trusted and reliable sources of information and what sites aren’t. So do I. But our favorite sites are very different. I don’t have enough time to read all of your favorite sites on the internet in addition to my own, I barely have enough time to read my internet, let alone yours.
Landsburg brings up the point that it’s the same way with books. This is really sad. I think that, deep down, every bibliophile secretly desires everyone else in the world to read all of the books that they themselves have read. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s just not going to happen.
(This is true, if only because there are some books of mine that Mrs. Wilson refuses to read because she’s just not interested in them. A 250 page excerpt from a late 1800s economist’s work on Value and Price? Sounds great to me, but I don’t think she’ll be slogging through it any time soon.)