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When a Book Costs Less Than a Drink…

I will admit it straight from the off! I am a writer with an axe to grind and I cannot understand people who complain that books are too expensive. Most books, in the form of ebooks, cost less than the price of a drink!

My ebooks cost an average of 8p or 10c per 1,600 words, which means that a coffee costing £2.40 is the equivalent of a 48,000-word book! Let’s call it 50,000 words… because many writers use that as the norm these days.

Mine are usually 80,000 to 112,000 words long or about the same as a coffee and a slice of cake!

Now, I’m sure that you don’t need me to tell you that a coffee and cake is normally consumed in twenty to thirty minutes, but most people would spend a week or two reading a book of 90,000 words!

So, where is the expense?

Not only that, but the coffee will soon be forgotten, but a good book could be remembered forever and even change your outlook on life, something that a coffee, no matter how good it is, will ever do.

People just don’t think much any more… their priorities have been skewed the wrong way. It is very sad.

I talk to a lot of people every week about reading and books, and it still saddens me to hear someone announce proudly that they haven’t read a book since leaving school… and I hear that several times a week!

The even more depressing problem with this sad state of affairs is that parents who don’t read much raise children who don’t read either. This has nothing to do with education, or at least, very little. It has to do with parents encouraging their children to fantasise with a good book.

The Baby Boomers are the first generation of working class writers, and their parents were the first generation of working class readers, so that was not all that long ago, but we need to keep the momentum going forward, but I can’t help thinking that we are going backwards.

It is very sad to witness and the remedy costs no more than the price of a coffee… with or without cake.

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: When a Book Costs Less Than a Drink…