Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
(I know you'll realize that I'm exhorting myself! Really, it was a bad moment when I had to acknowledge my folly. I leap on a potential purchase as if I had nothing at all to read and ebooks were about to leave the planet.)
|
I think I've behaved like that at times. Of course, in the UK it's possible that ebook prices will be up 16.5% next year, due to VAT changes. That might also help me curb my spending!
Looking back at what I'd read over the past five years (I'm so pleased I started recording what I read), I find that I've read about $2650 worth of ebooks, and spent $2250 on ebooks. Hmm.... not so bad, after all.
Hey - my average spend over five years is exactly $450/£300 - my target for 2015!
So long as we're only spending 'surplus' income on ebooks, I suppose it's not really a problem. At least ebooks only take up hard disk space, not physical space.
[EDIT]The temptation to play with figures from my calibre database is irresistible.
I've just made a spreadsheet of all the ebooks I've bought since January 2002, 2673 of them, and I've read 75% of them (80% by value). They cost me $7669.01 (excess precision, I know), an average of $2.89. The ones I've read have an average price of $3.05, the unread ones of $2.32. So it seems that my more expensive purchases are ones I want to read more, which makes sense, I suppose. My unread bought books have cost me $1545.56. About a third of that is from 2008 - the year that DRM removal tools for Mobipocket ebooks became readily available. It seems I went a bit wild with my spending in 2008.
Perhaps most interesting from a non-financial point of view is that my average books read per year is a bit over 160 books per year. I suspect this reflects a lower average in the first half of that time period, before I moved fully to ebooks (i.e. before so many books were available as ebooks) as I've averaged very nearly 200 books per year over the past five years.