Before Netflix I wasn’t buying hundreds of DVDs per year. It doesn’t make sense to claim that use of a service, even a free one, constitutes “savings” based on hypothetical behavior where you would have bought all the content individually at list price.
That’s the thing, in a lot of cases you’d simply go without whether you wanted to or not. They use “savings” to illustrate how much it would have cost to buy all those books on their own, that’s it. They clearly wanted to read those books but they wouldn’t be able to afford them without a library. If they had the money to spend on them I’m sure they would have but they didn’t and that’s literally the whole point.
Not being able to afford something and not wanting that something are different and calling this “savings” is fine and makes complete sense.
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Example: I’ve seen 1085 episodes of One Piece. Without Crunchyroll(and it’s low fees, compared to buying box sets I’d never rewatch) I’d never have been able to see all that content. I would have wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Or to mirror your own words more: Before Crunchyroll I never would have seen it as without the service to offer these savings I’d be shit out of luck.
This person has read 40 books. They must love those books so much that they would have definitely bought them if this library didn’t exist. It’s not saving per se, but it’s money that could have been spent. They got the books they love and they didn’t spend the money. Win win, right?
They wouldn’t have spent 60k on books over that time, they’ve only saved that much because the books were free. If they had to pay for the books they would have been more selective and less liberal in the amount.
Spending $150 a week is just a lot of money to spend on books, it’s only that much because of the free price tag, so it’s extremely disingenuous to use that amount as people wouldn’t realistically spend that.
Yeah, libraries are so deceitful! It’s all a big conspiracy to promote literacy and give people books that they don’t even need!!! I can’t believe they’re forcing us to take advantage of them like this!
A more realistic metric would be used books (also reflects the quality of all but brand new fresh books which are a rarity obviously), but you can’t quantify that price, so yes using new is disingenuous, but go off on a rant I guess? I think it’s a great idea, but let’s not kid ourselves that people would actually be spending that amount on books. It’s great for a feel good story though, I’ll give you that.
I prefer to buy books to own. But books are expensive, so if a particular book feels like it’s not something worth the money to keep, I just borrow it from the library instead. That’s literally money saved for me. Yeah, you could argue that if the library wouldn’t have been an option then maybe I wouldn’t have bought the book at all, so no difference there, but it’s still the difference between reading the book for free or not reading the book at all.
My partner is in the Lit world and you drastically underestimate how much some people can read. If they are an avid reader and a long-standing member I can see it. Especially If they’re using the retail price to calculate that it adds up quick. hardcovers can easily be $40-60.
She also has a kid and has been going with the kid to the library since he was born to check out a bunch of books every week. He’s in grade school now… I want to say he’s 10?
$6996.99 per year is $134.56 per week. If you get 5 books per week, that’s $26.91 per book. Given the picture includes a single book costing $19.95, that feels very reasonable. Maybe it’s 6 books a week, maybe some books are more expensive.
Especially children’s books in terms of a per-page ratio. You check out 10 children’s books, because your kid will get through them all in a few days, that could be $200 worth of books.
I can go through 4 or more books a week depending on their length. I read a fuck ton. Using the Libby app to have books sent to my kindle automatically has really changed my life. Being able to just grab my kindle at any moment, read for 15 minutes while I wait for something, as well as an hour or two at the end of the night. It adds up quickly. I will say that I read a lot of “lighter” fare, so I can breeze through without much issue. If I get into something more heavy or some dense non-fiction it will slow down considerably.
Yeah she easily reads into the 200+ range which is about the same pace as you. A lot her non-work related books end up being audiobooks though. I personally need to feel paper in my hands or I have trouble focusing, but I also almost exclusively read high fantasy for fiction and philosophy for non-fiction. I’m lucky to finish half a dozen books a year on a good year!
I work in a kitchen, most of the time by myself, so I throw an audio book on at double speed and I can crank through a 16 hour book in one shift. It helps to lighten the mental load of the work, especially during slower times where I get fidgety. I do understand the need for paper, I just don’t have the room for it. If there is a book that is important to me, then I’ll grab a physical copy, but if it’s some random sci-fi that I’m just testing out, I’m leaning hard into that Libby app to see if I’ll actually enjoy it.
I’m always jealous of people who can listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I genuinely can’t listen to them and do something else at the same time so I have to sit twiddling my thumbs the entire time and get antsy. If I try listen and maybe do the dishes or something, I’ll blink and have no idea what’s been said for the past 15 minutes and have to go back anyway. It kind of sucks.
Same here. But with eBooks too. Sometimes my brain drifts for a while and I reread the same paragraph 5 times. So what I do is “double-dip”. I listen to and read the ebook at the same time. This way my brain has no chance of escaping. This has also helped me with my English; oh, so that’s how you pronounce albeit?
Hello fellow ADHD adult! I’ve heard the advice about using the double medium before but never given it a shot. Honestly it would probably work great, but I’ve just never committed to it.
It works great for me. Not for my wife though, who is textbook ADHD. She reads slow, and if she matches the speed for the audiobook to her reading speed, it gets boring :) the wonders of neurodiversity :)
I’ve found that I have the most success with stuff I know fairly well. I’ll listen to Tolkien, Asimov, or King because I’ve read the books 10 times and if I miss a bit, I still know what is going on.
I don’t know exactly what she reads, but I am guessing it’s also lighter fare, leaning on sci-fi/fantasy. Not that she isn’t smart, she just is (like me) someone who prefers to read for the enjoyment of the story rather than the challenge.
How much money is she spending that just the savings add up to 60’000? Or is that just an error and that’s the joke?
It’s the price of the books she would have bought otherwise.
Oh so just one grad school text book.
But she wouldn’t have?
Before Netflix I wasn’t buying hundreds of DVDs per year. It doesn’t make sense to claim that use of a service, even a free one, constitutes “savings” based on hypothetical behavior where you would have bought all the content individually at list price.
I understand your argument but my rebuttal is a simple no.
sigh
Nobody does “talk to the hand” anymore. Where did we as a society lose the confidence to shove our hand into someones face, and tell them to shut it?
It’s highly offensive to those without hands, can you please stop being so ableist?
at least 6 people got wooshed here
Maybe they didn’t get wooshed, they just thought it was a dumb joke.
Eleven even. 🫸🏼
Are you effectively demanding someone argue with you? How Boomer.
That’s the thing, in a lot of cases you’d simply go without whether you wanted to or not. They use “savings” to illustrate how much it would have cost to buy all those books on their own, that’s it. They clearly wanted to read those books but they wouldn’t be able to afford them without a library. If they had the money to spend on them I’m sure they would have but they didn’t and that’s literally the whole point.
Not being able to afford something and not wanting that something are different and calling this “savings” is fine and makes complete sense.
—
Example: I’ve seen 1085 episodes of One Piece. Without Crunchyroll(and it’s low fees, compared to buying box sets I’d never rewatch) I’d never have been able to see all that content. I would have wanted to, but I couldn’t.
Or to mirror your own words more: Before Crunchyroll I never would have seen it as without the service to offer these savings I’d be shit out of luck.
Before Netflix there were such obscure things called libraries.
Remember Blockbuster?
I try not to. I worked there twice.
Why’d you go back?
The first time was fun because I had a good manager and Netflix was still seen by them as the upstart and not a real competitor.
A couple of years later and things at a different location under a coke head manager made for a very different experience.
How does someone working at blockbuster afford a coke addiction?
This person has read 40 books. They must love those books so much that they would have definitely bought them if this library didn’t exist. It’s not saving per se, but it’s money that could have been spent. They got the books they love and they didn’t spend the money. Win win, right?
Why does everyone assume books equals novels. The books loaned might have been text books or even journals.
Children’s books mostly.
They wouldn’t have spent 60k on books over that time, they’ve only saved that much because the books were free. If they had to pay for the books they would have been more selective and less liberal in the amount.
Spending $150 a week is just a lot of money to spend on books, it’s only that much because of the free price tag, so it’s extremely disingenuous to use that amount as people wouldn’t realistically spend that.
Yeah, libraries are so deceitful! It’s all a big conspiracy to promote literacy and give people books that they don’t even need!!! I can’t believe they’re forcing us to take advantage of them like this!
A more realistic metric would be used books (also reflects the quality of all but brand new fresh books which are a rarity obviously), but you can’t quantify that price, so yes using new is disingenuous, but go off on a rant I guess? I think it’s a great idea, but let’s not kid ourselves that people would actually be spending that amount on books. It’s great for a feel good story though, I’ll give you that.
Do used bookstores all charge the same prices these days?
“We made a pretty lie. You may commence with feeling good now”
It’s just semantics.
“Save” often just means receiving whatever value free of charge.
I’ve not seen it used that way
Amazing.
I prefer to buy books to own. But books are expensive, so if a particular book feels like it’s not something worth the money to keep, I just borrow it from the library instead. That’s literally money saved for me. Yeah, you could argue that if the library wouldn’t have been an option then maybe I wouldn’t have bought the book at all, so no difference there, but it’s still the difference between reading the book for free or not reading the book at all.
My partner is in the Lit world and you drastically underestimate how much some people can read. If they are an avid reader and a long-standing member I can see it. Especially If they’re using the retail price to calculate that it adds up quick. hardcovers can easily be $40-60.
She also has a kid and has been going with the kid to the library since he was born to check out a bunch of books every week. He’s in grade school now… I want to say he’s 10?
$6996.99 per year is $134.56 per week. If you get 5 books per week, that’s $26.91 per book. Given the picture includes a single book costing $19.95, that feels very reasonable. Maybe it’s 6 books a week, maybe some books are more expensive.
That’s a very consistent habit though.
They literally go every week and she and her husband and her kid all use it, so it would add up.
I go to the library every week with my kids. We usually have 20-30 books checked out at a time. 5 books per week is nothing for a whole family.
Yeah that’s definitely where that amount is coming from if it’s been well over a decade. Books are actually really fricken expensive!
Especially children’s books in terms of a per-page ratio. You check out 10 children’s books, because your kid will get through them all in a few days, that could be $200 worth of books.
With children’s books most of the page count will be in illustrations. You’ll go through them very quickly.
I can go through 4 or more books a week depending on their length. I read a fuck ton. Using the Libby app to have books sent to my kindle automatically has really changed my life. Being able to just grab my kindle at any moment, read for 15 minutes while I wait for something, as well as an hour or two at the end of the night. It adds up quickly. I will say that I read a lot of “lighter” fare, so I can breeze through without much issue. If I get into something more heavy or some dense non-fiction it will slow down considerably.
Yeah she easily reads into the 200+ range which is about the same pace as you. A lot her non-work related books end up being audiobooks though. I personally need to feel paper in my hands or I have trouble focusing, but I also almost exclusively read high fantasy for fiction and philosophy for non-fiction. I’m lucky to finish half a dozen books a year on a good year!
I work in a kitchen, most of the time by myself, so I throw an audio book on at double speed and I can crank through a 16 hour book in one shift. It helps to lighten the mental load of the work, especially during slower times where I get fidgety. I do understand the need for paper, I just don’t have the room for it. If there is a book that is important to me, then I’ll grab a physical copy, but if it’s some random sci-fi that I’m just testing out, I’m leaning hard into that Libby app to see if I’ll actually enjoy it.
I’m always jealous of people who can listen to podcasts or audiobooks. I genuinely can’t listen to them and do something else at the same time so I have to sit twiddling my thumbs the entire time and get antsy. If I try listen and maybe do the dishes or something, I’ll blink and have no idea what’s been said for the past 15 minutes and have to go back anyway. It kind of sucks.
Same here. But with eBooks too. Sometimes my brain drifts for a while and I reread the same paragraph 5 times. So what I do is “double-dip”. I listen to and read the ebook at the same time. This way my brain has no chance of escaping. This has also helped me with my English; oh, so that’s how you pronounce albeit?
Hello fellow ADHD adult! I’ve heard the advice about using the double medium before but never given it a shot. Honestly it would probably work great, but I’ve just never committed to it.
It works great for me. Not for my wife though, who is textbook ADHD. She reads slow, and if she matches the speed for the audiobook to her reading speed, it gets boring :) the wonders of neurodiversity :)
I’ve found that I have the most success with stuff I know fairly well. I’ll listen to Tolkien, Asimov, or King because I’ve read the books 10 times and if I miss a bit, I still know what is going on.
I don’t know exactly what she reads, but I am guessing it’s also lighter fare, leaning on sci-fi/fantasy. Not that she isn’t smart, she just is (like me) someone who prefers to read for the enjoyment of the story rather than the challenge.
Oh for sure. I love a heavy read when I have time time to enjoy it, but I can’t eat 10lbs of beef for every meal. Sometimes I want a berry smoothie.
I used to love heavy reads, but the older I get the more it just wears me out. I just don’t have the patience for such things anymore.
I totally understand :)