Q: Why Buy Books?

A: Hours and hours of entertainment.

Let's take a look. Fifty Shade of Grey by E.L. James is the number one on the New York Times Best Sellers list for fiction. (Surprise!) How long would it take an average reader to consume this book?

We go inside the numbers.
528 - number of pages in the paperback (according to Amazon)
306 - number of words on page 4 (I counted these using the "Click to Look Inside" function on Amazon. I may be the only middle-aged Mommy that doesn't own this trilogy.)
200-250 - number of words the average reader plows through in a minute (according to http://mindbluff.com/askread2.htm You can also test your words/minute on this site.)
$15.95 - the list price for the paperback

Therefore it would take 10.7 hours to read Fifty Shades of Grey and cost you $1.49 per hour. And that's buying the book at list price, which is crazy. The book is available everywhere from Costco to Target to Amazon for much cheaper.

The audio book of Fifty Shade of Grey runs 19 hours and 47 minutes. If you read that slowly, you are only paying $1.24 per hour.

I am not going to mention the hours (or minutes) of entertainment that may accompany this book post-read. It's too hard to calculate.

Now let's look at movies and their value. The last movie I watched in a theater was Total Recall. I was not a fan. The best part of the experience was the Axe commercial starring Kiefer Sutherland--that was clever. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX5PsV2uMVg

Total Recall is 1 hour and 49 minutes long. I paid $9.50 (my hubby also attended but I'll only count my experience). That's $5.22 per hour of movie going fun just for me. I'm overlooking some huge differences between books and movies. TR costs a lot more to create than 50 Shades, no doubt. I only want to consider the price paid by the consumer. And a good book wins every time.

One final thought, who is the better leading men? I have not read 50 Shades, but I hear that Christian Grey is it. And if you don't like the way James describes the 27 year-old billionaire, you can picture your husband or Matt Damon. It's much harder to watch Total Recall and imagine anyone other than Colin Farrell--well, maybe Arnold, but that takes a lot more work.