Book A Week: Week 4

Week four and book four. Short book last week, fiction the week before, and another short one for week one. Time for something industrious.

The book this week is Infamous Scribblers by Eric Burns. Subtitled "The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism." The book weighs in at over 400 pages, so I'm going to be doing about 70 pages per day to meet my goal -- that's a bit over three chapters, on average.

I've wanted to read this book ever since it came out a couple years ago. Finally bought it over the weekend at Borders, with a gift card my sister gave me for Christmas. I was a bit upset to see the price at Amazon -- it's less than half of what I paid at Borders. I've decided I'm never buying a book at the bookstore again -- there's not enough value added to my experience at a brick and mortar Borders to make me want to pay $10 more for a book. Instant gratification isn't worth that much to me. That's the sad thing about Amazon's dominance in the online bookselling business: they can discount heavily enough that it's not worth driving to the bookstore just to get the book today.

And I'm sure, as my wife said mere moments ago, that I'll be back in the bookstore buying books again in no time. But I'm going to be a lot more conscious about the prices of books that I really want -- bookstore purchases are going to end up being impulse buys, or killer sales. The days of me taking a wishlist to the store and leaving with an armload of books are over. I'll pay the shipping and let the UPS guy haul my books to my house for me.