Inflation and Payments
Apr. 18th, 2026 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutOoooh, two previous post themes appearing in one post. Whatever might happen next. I for sure do not know; this is stream of consciousness.
Yesterday, I had a delightful conversation with K., after my walk with AS and before my walk with M. K. had been reading SBTB, which we share a love for (truly — do not interpret any of what I am about to say as a generalizable criticism of books, SBTB, or the truly awesome folk who run it. My identity issues are not their problem, responsibility, etc.). (And I subscribe to After Dark and do NOT intend to cancel that, either!)
K. pointed me at this post:
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2026/04/books-as-luxury-items/
This is the BEST description ever of something I’ve been watching develop over recent years. The most rock-in-my-shoe example is not in this post. That would be people reading a hardback on an airplane. LOTS of people doing this. Logan has a bookstore that sells hardbacks so people can do this. I used to watch people get off planes and put the paperback they bought before boarding go directly into the trash after they debarked, and was — oh, come on, you know me! — horrified at the waste and disrespect to the book (which generally speaking deserved the disrespect and no one should have been reading those books anyway, and I now obsessively listen to If Books Could Kill — again with the values driven positions that are not compatible!). Are they throwing away the hardbacks now? I don’t know. If you do, and you tell me, I’ll try to keep my messy emotions to myself, and thank you. I also will likely need to take the rest of the day off to cope with those emotions.
FWIW, my primary question about the hardbacks on the plane was How Do They Bring Enough for the Whole Trip? And the answer I had already figured out: these are the slowest readers I have ever encountered reading voluntarily as adults in the wild. So. They don’t need another book for at least another month; they’re fine.
I also feel compelled to mention tefillin, and that if you, too, are wondering about the Islamic position on wearing holy scripture, the answer is don’t do it.
The post at SBTB is a really careful analysis of inflation of food and some other items, and how that reflects in “luxury” goods (like handbags and other items produced by “luxury” brands). 100% here for the nuanced and respectful analysis of things that are important and that are knee-jerk disrespected by a lot of annoying people.
The conclusion reached, however, was a bomb, as in “The movie was a bomb.” Not a good kind of bomb (as in, “That shit is the bomb! You have to try it!”. Or the literal kind of bomb — no damage was done).
“ new book accessories similarly: they’re a wealth signal that reveals the increasing fragility of literacy and book access for children and adults.”
The analysis about having the time to read a whole book — that part is fine. I may come back to it, but it’s basically fine. The part about “book access” is NOT fine. Books have NEVER been as accessible as they are now. You can get to this conclusion from multiple angles (price of used books, pirate e-book sites, cheapness of e-books in general, ubiquity of smart phones for consuming e-books).
BookRiot has done a lot of cost-of-books analyses over the years, in many cases just OMG more expensive without any kind of but compared to everything else is it? Type of questioning.
https://bookriot.com/were-in-a-book-affordability-crisis/
This one DOES make use of inflation calculators, and hedge their bets a bit: “ Because I do not own these tools and mistakes can be made moving data across tools, I can say these are only approximate price estimates.”
I don’t see that as nearly as much of a problem as using 2017 as the end date in the series. So the shilling Dickens from 1836, for example, would now cost over 100 shillings, or more like $.77, than the .47 that is quoted — entirely the result of the massive inflation of recent years, 30% since 2019, give or take.
My parents were “Silent Generation” and I grew up listening to a lot of stories of What Things Used to Cost, because I grew up in the 1970s, and there was a massive repricing that occurred. While those who own fear stagflation — an increase in the general price level without a matching increase in value of owned assets — I learned a very different lesson. Inflation erases debt. If you owe someone a specific amount of money, and the value of the money decreases, while the value of your labor is compensated with more money AND YOU HAVE A JOB which a union electrician in the 1970s in Seattle most certainly did — then your mortgage payment gets super easy to pay.
Things are different for different people, and I personally live in a different era and am not a union electrician in the 1970s. My father handled the ensuing decades well, altho in a way at odds with my personal values (IRA, stock in the squish, I don’t need to say anything more here).
But back to that BookRiot piece!
“ While audiobooks are expensive, ebooks are a relatively cheap alternative that can be downloaded immediately. However, consumers do not own these books in perpetuity. They are simply given limited access to the books through Digital Rights Management (DRM) licenses. Consumers cannot resell ebooks or share them with friends or archive them in any way. Because of these limitations to total ownership, I do not think digital copies of books replace the object value of paper books.”
Well, SURE, you don’t, but the market definitely spoke. If bananas are expensive, they buy apples. Are apples bananas? Fuck no! And even the worthless pedants fighting over the basket of goods did recognize that if your consumer basket of goods contains things that people quit buying because they had become wildly unaffordable, and were buying other things, then you did need to change the contents of the basket of goods or you aren’t measuring anything meaningful any more.
BUT THAT IS NOT MY POINT AT ALL.
My point is that I switched to e-books for reasons that were only tangentially related to price. Which is to say, my husband bought me a first gen kindle as a holiday gift, and I spent way too much time tracking whether it made sense to continue to buy paper books when an e-book was available or not. Generally speaking, as BookRiot notes, the mass market paperback was cheaper when both were available. In early years, you could not get many books as e-books AND the release schedule on e-books was fucking bizarre and changeable. I _wanted_ e-books, but was prepared to buy used paperbacks when cheaper if available, and I also bought a bunch of new hardcovers which I read and immediately donated to the library because I wanted to read them when they came out but did not want to own them in hardcover.
THESE are actual reader decisions about price vs. value.
Not, do I _really_ own them by a Gen X’ers definition of “ownership”, which 100% is not shared by even other Gen X’ers, much less other generations.
In a world full of direct-to-e-book, dismissing the e-book as a valid form of book is akin to the dismissal and contempt routinely accorded to those direct-to-paperback romance novels used as a basis for comparison.
A few more remarks about e-books vs p-books. If I drop my kindle into the tub, I can take it back out and keep reading. Literally. (I might need to replace the cover.) If I drop my paperback into the tub…
If I lose my kindle, or it stops working, or the dog eats it, I still own all those books. If I left my kindle at home, I can keep reading on my phone. I could go on. I won’t go on. There are so many ways that e-book ownership is a persistent and valuable form of ownership that p-books can never live up to. You can play this game forever, just like you can fight over if people bought bananas routinely in one year, and can’t afford them and buy oranges in an other year, well, how SHOULD we calculate the consumer basket of goods? And the answer is, _why_ were you calculating the consumer basket of goods?
There is only an affordability crisis of books in the sense that there is a general rise in prices of 30% over the last 5-6 years that p-books have participated in. There is no affordability of access or price to purchase books if you are willing to accept the decisions made by the actual readers.
Finally, do y’all even remember how shitty a reading experience of mass markets was? I cannot fucking believe we are acting like that provided reader value. You never owned a mass market paperback. THEY SHARED UPC CODES WITH BOOKS BY OTHER AUTHORS WITH DIFFERENT TITLES. They were never expected to be reread. Most people destroyed those books by the time they were a third of the way through them. People who were careful and kept them long enough to reread and sell at a garage sale nevertheless left you everything you needed to find every sex scene in the book.
The fucking _audacity_ of p-book pricing discourse, in combination with the aesthetic of p-book ownership, has accomplish the impossible. I am ashamed to have ever identified as a reader and owner of books. I’m packing it in.
I’ll still read voraciously of course. It’s my substance of choice.
ETA: I fixed an open paren and changed a sentence end / sentence start. But otherwise, this is entirely stream of consciousness. Or stream of conscience, as the case may be.
ETA: Fixed another open paren by adding it before the period.
ETA: My description of my purchasing decisions in the early e-book years (not counting rocket e-book) is incoherent, however, _this blog covers the years in question and you can go back and read about the decision making process as I was making it_. Earliest example I have found so far: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/164867.html
I made a spreadsheet and blogged about it here: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/167392.html
I got pretty mad here: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/168137.html
Rereading that really got me thinking hard about my identity as a reader vs. my identity as an Owner Of Books. I’ve tended to separate them, and to get fairly annoyed at people who don’t — I used to tag things something along the lines of “Mocking Ebook commentary”, and I still occasionally refer to lovers of-p-books in their pre-transition to e-book days as “book huffers”.
I wonder how much of that is just my petty resentment of being unable to get rid of paper books like “Home-Psych”, because they are unavailable in e-book format.
Yesterday, I had a delightful conversation with K., after my walk with AS and before my walk with M. K. had been reading SBTB, which we share a love for (truly — do not interpret any of what I am about to say as a generalizable criticism of books, SBTB, or the truly awesome folk who run it. My identity issues are not their problem, responsibility, etc.). (And I subscribe to After Dark and do NOT intend to cancel that, either!)
K. pointed me at this post:
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2026/04/books-as-luxury-items/
This is the BEST description ever of something I’ve been watching develop over recent years. The most rock-in-my-shoe example is not in this post. That would be people reading a hardback on an airplane. LOTS of people doing this. Logan has a bookstore that sells hardbacks so people can do this. I used to watch people get off planes and put the paperback they bought before boarding go directly into the trash after they debarked, and was — oh, come on, you know me! — horrified at the waste and disrespect to the book (which generally speaking deserved the disrespect and no one should have been reading those books anyway, and I now obsessively listen to If Books Could Kill — again with the values driven positions that are not compatible!). Are they throwing away the hardbacks now? I don’t know. If you do, and you tell me, I’ll try to keep my messy emotions to myself, and thank you. I also will likely need to take the rest of the day off to cope with those emotions.
FWIW, my primary question about the hardbacks on the plane was How Do They Bring Enough for the Whole Trip? And the answer I had already figured out: these are the slowest readers I have ever encountered reading voluntarily as adults in the wild. So. They don’t need another book for at least another month; they’re fine.
I also feel compelled to mention tefillin, and that if you, too, are wondering about the Islamic position on wearing holy scripture, the answer is don’t do it.
The post at SBTB is a really careful analysis of inflation of food and some other items, and how that reflects in “luxury” goods (like handbags and other items produced by “luxury” brands). 100% here for the nuanced and respectful analysis of things that are important and that are knee-jerk disrespected by a lot of annoying people.
The conclusion reached, however, was a bomb, as in “The movie was a bomb.” Not a good kind of bomb (as in, “That shit is the bomb! You have to try it!”. Or the literal kind of bomb — no damage was done).
“ new book accessories similarly: they’re a wealth signal that reveals the increasing fragility of literacy and book access for children and adults.”
The analysis about having the time to read a whole book — that part is fine. I may come back to it, but it’s basically fine. The part about “book access” is NOT fine. Books have NEVER been as accessible as they are now. You can get to this conclusion from multiple angles (price of used books, pirate e-book sites, cheapness of e-books in general, ubiquity of smart phones for consuming e-books).
BookRiot has done a lot of cost-of-books analyses over the years, in many cases just OMG more expensive without any kind of but compared to everything else is it? Type of questioning.
https://bookriot.com/were-in-a-book-affordability-crisis/
This one DOES make use of inflation calculators, and hedge their bets a bit: “ Because I do not own these tools and mistakes can be made moving data across tools, I can say these are only approximate price estimates.”
I don’t see that as nearly as much of a problem as using 2017 as the end date in the series. So the shilling Dickens from 1836, for example, would now cost over 100 shillings, or more like $.77, than the .47 that is quoted — entirely the result of the massive inflation of recent years, 30% since 2019, give or take.
My parents were “Silent Generation” and I grew up listening to a lot of stories of What Things Used to Cost, because I grew up in the 1970s, and there was a massive repricing that occurred. While those who own fear stagflation — an increase in the general price level without a matching increase in value of owned assets — I learned a very different lesson. Inflation erases debt. If you owe someone a specific amount of money, and the value of the money decreases, while the value of your labor is compensated with more money AND YOU HAVE A JOB which a union electrician in the 1970s in Seattle most certainly did — then your mortgage payment gets super easy to pay.
Things are different for different people, and I personally live in a different era and am not a union electrician in the 1970s. My father handled the ensuing decades well, altho in a way at odds with my personal values (IRA, stock in the squish, I don’t need to say anything more here).
But back to that BookRiot piece!
“ While audiobooks are expensive, ebooks are a relatively cheap alternative that can be downloaded immediately. However, consumers do not own these books in perpetuity. They are simply given limited access to the books through Digital Rights Management (DRM) licenses. Consumers cannot resell ebooks or share them with friends or archive them in any way. Because of these limitations to total ownership, I do not think digital copies of books replace the object value of paper books.”
Well, SURE, you don’t, but the market definitely spoke. If bananas are expensive, they buy apples. Are apples bananas? Fuck no! And even the worthless pedants fighting over the basket of goods did recognize that if your consumer basket of goods contains things that people quit buying because they had become wildly unaffordable, and were buying other things, then you did need to change the contents of the basket of goods or you aren’t measuring anything meaningful any more.
BUT THAT IS NOT MY POINT AT ALL.
My point is that I switched to e-books for reasons that were only tangentially related to price. Which is to say, my husband bought me a first gen kindle as a holiday gift, and I spent way too much time tracking whether it made sense to continue to buy paper books when an e-book was available or not. Generally speaking, as BookRiot notes, the mass market paperback was cheaper when both were available. In early years, you could not get many books as e-books AND the release schedule on e-books was fucking bizarre and changeable. I _wanted_ e-books, but was prepared to buy used paperbacks when cheaper if available, and I also bought a bunch of new hardcovers which I read and immediately donated to the library because I wanted to read them when they came out but did not want to own them in hardcover.
THESE are actual reader decisions about price vs. value.
Not, do I _really_ own them by a Gen X’ers definition of “ownership”, which 100% is not shared by even other Gen X’ers, much less other generations.
In a world full of direct-to-e-book, dismissing the e-book as a valid form of book is akin to the dismissal and contempt routinely accorded to those direct-to-paperback romance novels used as a basis for comparison.
A few more remarks about e-books vs p-books. If I drop my kindle into the tub, I can take it back out and keep reading. Literally. (I might need to replace the cover.) If I drop my paperback into the tub…
If I lose my kindle, or it stops working, or the dog eats it, I still own all those books. If I left my kindle at home, I can keep reading on my phone. I could go on. I won’t go on. There are so many ways that e-book ownership is a persistent and valuable form of ownership that p-books can never live up to. You can play this game forever, just like you can fight over if people bought bananas routinely in one year, and can’t afford them and buy oranges in an other year, well, how SHOULD we calculate the consumer basket of goods? And the answer is, _why_ were you calculating the consumer basket of goods?
There is only an affordability crisis of books in the sense that there is a general rise in prices of 30% over the last 5-6 years that p-books have participated in. There is no affordability of access or price to purchase books if you are willing to accept the decisions made by the actual readers.
Finally, do y’all even remember how shitty a reading experience of mass markets was? I cannot fucking believe we are acting like that provided reader value. You never owned a mass market paperback. THEY SHARED UPC CODES WITH BOOKS BY OTHER AUTHORS WITH DIFFERENT TITLES. They were never expected to be reread. Most people destroyed those books by the time they were a third of the way through them. People who were careful and kept them long enough to reread and sell at a garage sale nevertheless left you everything you needed to find every sex scene in the book.
The fucking _audacity_ of p-book pricing discourse, in combination with the aesthetic of p-book ownership, has accomplish the impossible. I am ashamed to have ever identified as a reader and owner of books. I’m packing it in.
I’ll still read voraciously of course. It’s my substance of choice.
ETA: I fixed an open paren and changed a sentence end / sentence start. But otherwise, this is entirely stream of consciousness. Or stream of conscience, as the case may be.
ETA: Fixed another open paren by adding it before the period.
ETA: My description of my purchasing decisions in the early e-book years (not counting rocket e-book) is incoherent, however, _this blog covers the years in question and you can go back and read about the decision making process as I was making it_. Earliest example I have found so far: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/164867.html
I made a spreadsheet and blogged about it here: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/167392.html
I got pretty mad here: https://walkitout.dreamwidth.org/168137.html
Rereading that really got me thinking hard about my identity as a reader vs. my identity as an Owner Of Books. I’ve tended to separate them, and to get fairly annoyed at people who don’t — I used to tag things something along the lines of “Mocking Ebook commentary”, and I still occasionally refer to lovers of-p-books in their pre-transition to e-book days as “book huffers”.
I wonder how much of that is just my petty resentment of being unable to get rid of paper books like “Home-Psych”, because they are unavailable in e-book format.