how much money do you spend for books

[mohammadali]

hello everybody i am really keen to know how much money you pay for your books and books are cheap or expensive in your area?
i am living in iran a country which there is no copy write rule so books are really cheap. for example a novel will be less than 3dollors with 10 dollars you can buy more than 5 books. last week i went to book shop and bought 10 books different topics: short story ,critical analysis , foreign language teaching, literary terms and ... and it costs me something less than 10 dollars.
every month i will spend 15$ for books university and hobby. sometimes even less than that. also sometimes i can download books for free and don`t spend even a penny but i don`t like to do that because it bothers the authors and publications so i prefer to buy books than downloading them but here you can download so many books without paying a penny.
what about you?
how much money do you spend for book?
are books cheap or expensive?

[Charles Darnay]

Hm, I know where I should go to buy books (although the flight and consecutive problems of being in Iran would probably offset the cost).


I just bought a newly released book, hardcover, and it cost me 30$ before tax. Paperbacks are cheaper: new ones are about 20$. But you can find good books, usually old ones, for under 10$.

[Kyriakos]

Books cost a fortune here. Most new ones will regularly run to 20 euros.

Which is why i have been feeding off my already purchased tomes for the last year...

[Anymodal]

In Buenos Aires it varies a lot because half of the libraries are neiborhood traditional libraries and not only they sell new books but also used. For example the last book I bought was used for 27pesos=$5.8 but you can get a used one by $2 sometimes.
A new edition of L. F. Celine 'Journey to the end of the night' costs $24.5. I'd say that woud be the average price to buy a new book here.

I forgot: A college book, for example a big complex calculus book, can cost from $40 to $65

[Shevek]

I generally don't buy anything over $20 (except for university). I try to buy used, which can cost anywhere from one cent to around $15. I have access to two university libraries so I never have trouble finding what I want if I can't/choose not to buy something.

[dfloyd]

unless, of course you are a student and have little affordability. If you are very affluent, a signed first edition can cost thousands of dollars. Finely printed books can run thousands also. A two-volume Don Quixote published by Arion in San Francisco recently cost subscribers $4000. The most I have ever paid for a book was for Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea published by The Limited Editions Club: $950.

Book collectors regularly pay $500 per month for their Finely printed and bound books. And these people aren't rich. They just love books, and condider their books an art form.

The last book I bouught was a six-volume edition of Tolstoy's War and Peace published by The Limited Editions Club in 1938: $375.

[Lokasenna]

I spend quite a lot of money on books, if only because thanks to my scholarship I actually have money for once - so I'm using it while I have it to expand my personal library.

That said, I'm running out of room. When I finally make the leap into solo domestication, as opposed to living in a house-share, I'm going to have to give over at least two rooms to pure library space...

[crusoe]

If your personal taste is more ancient or classic, you'll find nearly everything online.
So with an eBook-Reader, a Text-to-Speech Program and a MP3-Player one would spend next to Z E R O.

Once in while I buy an Audio-Book, but that is usually cheaper as the printed volume.
I travel light.

[kiki1982]

I think I would beat you all, apart from Mohammadali.

In Dutch, my language, books are incredibly expensive (to me at least). 20 EUR is nothing per book. I think probably similar to you, Kiriakos. Since I've moved to Germany, I don't have bookshop access to Dutch language books anymore so I buy English at about 2,10 EUR per book. Or used at Luxembourg's Christmas Bazar (all the embassies and consulates at Luxembourg's Christmas market), they've got a used book stall. The very first time we went, we got stuck there for the first 3 hours :lol:. Used bookshops in Trier, where I live, are full of German. That's nice, but not all the time. And more expensive than the Reclam editions. The little yellow, red or blue books. Cheap, nice and with a good introduction. Used books cost more.

My view on this is that a book, unless it is a special edition, is only worth the paper and ink that was used for printing it. No more. I cherish first editions and orthographs, maybe nice illustrations, but if there is none of that, I don't see why I should pay a lot because the publisher wants a lot for it.

So at this point I think, per year, I must spend between 50 and 100 Euro on books. But then I am a slow reader. :blush:

[stlukesguild]

Outside of art books, I haven't bought many books for the past couple of years for the simple reason that I have already amassed a sizable private library of somewhere around 3000 books... a good number of which I still have yet to read. I would say that less than a quarter of these were bought new. Many were "remaindered"... excess copies of an edition sold through used book stores at bargain prices... although they were technically new. Probably somewhere in the realm of 50% of my books were purchased second-hand... through small local used book stores... before Borders and Barnes & Nobles put these out of business... and were subsequently made obsolete by Amazon. I still regularly browse the large used books chain in my neighborhood and pick up something new every now and then. I'll also pick up a book or two every month from Amazon... usually through secondary dealers. Currently I have a little over 250 books on my Amazon "Wish List"... many of which are better editions or new translations of classics I already own. This number is rather insignificant in contrast to the 3000+ CDs I have on my Amazon Wish List. Without a doubt, I have spent far more on music than books for at least the last 2 or 3 years.

[stlukesguild]

That said, I'm running out of room. When I finally make the leap into solo domestication, as opposed to living in a house-share, I'm going to have to give over at least two rooms to pure library space...

That was my ideal as well... but my wife was not all that keen on it. Right now my library is limited to a single room stacked to high heaven.

[JBI]

I have a library probably around 1500 books now. Most are Chinese and cost me pennies. Canadian books are expensive, as we have a heavy import tax on them (even from the US as books are protected under nafta and subject to tariffs).

In China it is like 2$ per 300-pages, with 2000 page tombs going for about 5$ (good editions too). Taiwanese books are double to 4x as much as that, but are of a stronger quality. The universities here are required to give me free books though, So I added a nice chunk to my already swollen collection.

Generally though, in terms of bang for one's bunk, China is unparalleled in that they offer real copies for dirt cheap, and bootlegged copies for even cheaper. Getting them home is the tricky part.