Suppose that you are a young intellectual working in Washington, D.C., for the minimum wage, $14 per hour. Suppose further that you wish to give a friend a copy of Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation as a gift. Politics and Prose has it on its shelves for $25. The book will cost you less than two hours' wages before tax.
The Reformation has 812 pages. According to my recollection, twenty pages per hour would be a very fast rate for reading it with comprehension, but let's assume that the friend can read it at that rate. It will take the friend forty hours to read it, twenty times as long as it took you to earn the money to buy it. Now, if the friend is also employed at the minimum wage, and would have been likely in any case to acquire the book, he or she is two hours to the good. If your friend hadn't thought of reading the book, but does so dutifully, that will be three weeks of reading at two hours per night, not previously budgeted for.
This sort of consideration makes me think twice before giving books as gifts. It also gives me a bias in favor of books that can be picked up and put down--collections of essays for example. This is not to say that I wouldn't give someone a copy of The Reformation--which, after all, is admirably organized in chapters of about twelve pages--or a similarly hefty book. But I would have to know the recipient's taste very well.
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