Worth It?

Having fun doesn’t have to cost money, but it generally does. Let’s talk about some common activities that people do outside their home.

• Movies (In the theater): $13–$16 per ticket (about 2 hours) → $6.50–$8/hour

• Dinner Date (mid-range restaurant): $50–$100 per person for ~1.5–2 hours → $25–$65/hour

• Trampoline Park (indoor): $18–$28 for 1 hour pass → $18–$28/hour

• Axe Throwing: $25–$40 per person per hour → $25–$40/hour

• Bowling (lane cost): $20–$60 per lane per hour → if 4 people → $5–$15/hour/person

• Arcade Games (card-based play): 30¢–$3 per play or ~$10–$20/hour (unlimited passes) → $10–$20/hour

• Mini Golf: $13–$18 per round (≈45–60 min) → $13–$18/hour

• Laser Tag: $8–$14 per person per session (~30–45 min) → $12–$20/hour

• Roller Skating: $15–$20 per session (≈1 hour) → $15–$20/hour

• Indoor Karting / Racing: $20–$30 per race (~10–15 min) → when averaged → $40–$120/hour (if doing multiple races)

• Escape Room: $23–$34 per person for ~1 hour experience → $23–$34/hour

• Theme / Amusement Park (e.g., Six Flags, Disney, Cedar Fair): Typical full-day ticket ~ $105 average per day (~8–10 hrs) → $10–$13/hour

• Major parks (Disney / heavy dynamic pricing) often cost more on peak days.

People consider things like theme parks to be special occasions, and dinner dates as special occasions, so let’s call these special events. For a special event we seem to be willing to pay about $50-$120 an hour.

For doing something out, and considering it accessible, not necessarily a once-a-year event but perhaps a once-a-month or a weekend event we seem quite willing to pay $20 an hour. 

What about the nightly passing of time? For those we would typically look to Netflix, YouTube Premium, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. They are all comparably priced at about $15 a month. Given the watching patterns of America, which can range from 20 to as much as 50 + hours a week, that works out to $0.18 – $0.08 dollars per hour for daily events.

What about video games? Without breaking down amortization for the platforms and computers themselves a typical AAA game now costs $70. Typical game play loop is 30 hours with long style play at 60 with high level of replay value and then of course there are online multiplayer games, which I won’t touch for now for the sake of ease of math. It gets down to pennies on the hour anyway.  But a game will run at this estimate something between $0.50 and $1.50 an hour for gaming.

This is the landscape of competition for books.

What made me think about this question? The answer is this. Mass market paperback books, are dying. Read the details here.

These gems, the staple of my library, reading life and youth, are done. Why does it matter? This is why.

It's the $8.99, in case you were curious.

The average length of a novel depends vastly on genre, running form 70,000 to about 120,000 words. Of course, there are famous authors who have leeway to do far more, as much as 300,000 words, but they are rare and it impacts the price of the book little. So, lets work with the average and call it 95,000.

Let’s round up and say mass market paperbacks are going to cost you $10. They’re slightly cheaper but that’s okay.

How fast do people read? Heavy readers might bang out 400 words a minute in a topic they are familiar with. Most read about 250, I they read often, and leisure reading can get as low as 150-200 if you are not hurrying through thing. About the same speed we speak at.

Book length: 95,000 words, at 150-400 words per minute nets us 635 minutes to 240 minutes. At $10 for a purchase cost that lands us $0.016 - $0.041 per minute or about $1 – $2.50 per hour to read a paperback.

This is cheaper than every form of entertainment above except the daily streaming. Exactly the same book in the two remaining formats, which are trade paperback, and hardcover will have costs of about $20 and $40 respectively now have a cost per hour at $2 – $5 per hour to read a trade paperback and $4 – $10 per hour to read a hardcover. This lands into the bottom end of the once-a-week event.

Is reading still financially worth it? I haven’t touched the question of how to get cheaper books. The vast majority of my personal library is second hand, sometimes as cheap as 10 cents a book from friends of the library book sales. Cost there compares to streaming services. But is it worth it?

You would be hard pressed to convince a reader that the average streamed show is better than the average novel. I am among them. I will say with absolutely clarity the number of times I have watched a show and out loud railed against the idiotic group-think writing with no soul, not direction, no clear singular authorial mind, is countless. It is why I do so little of it. The number of times in my youth I used to want games to give me the freedom to do things I couldn’t do, and I was railroaded into bad concepts is what made me stop playing.

Books still hold a pair of freedoms for me that let them not only compete at cost, but compete for concept. First, the images, the voices, and the tone, are what I want them to be, to a fair degree. Authors can only force so much imagery on the reader, the rest is a cooperative action between their mind and ours, where we create the world according to the writer’s guidance. There is freedom in it.

The second is just as important. Perhaps in this day and age, more so.

I. Own. My. Books.

If you buy books digitally, you do not own them, you rent them long term until the platform shuts you out. You can’t lend them easily, or decide that nobody can take them from you. I won’t go into it here but let’s say Amazon's digital and audio book polices are not author and reader friendly.

You don’t own most of your games, you don’t own your favorite shows, you don’t own any of those things. You rent them. The now infamous statement, in the future, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy,” while a gross out of context misquote, does bring to light a reality. We rent everything, and the world has moved behind a paywall. But I still own my books. When the power goes out, or when the internet is down, they are mine. When I want to be unplugged, and have quiet time, they are mine. When I want to be sure I have no distractions, they are mine.

And they are cost effective.

I have written before about the clinical benefits of reading. See here for the series. I am a proponent of reading on so many levels but in this moment when the books of my childhood are dying out, I wanted to say with financial and conceptual certainty to the world:

Physical books. They are still worth it.