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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

I think it's hard to beat books for economical. But certainly games are in reach.

Well, sure or writing music or poetry or drawing or playing soccer with friends or....

It's an incomplete picture if you ignore the fact that videogames are infinitely more mentally accessible. There's plenty of very cheap, very fulfilling things to do with your time but they don't provide the instant, accessible dopamine hit that movies or videogames do, which put them out of reach for a lot of people.

I don't really watch TV or movies, and I play videogames pretty sparingly. I'm definitely glad I did it, and I find my hobbies now a lot more stimulating and rewarding, but I'd be lying if I pretended it wasn't a somewhat difficult habit to get into.

Are they really? I've never spent more than a few days on a book, but I've certainly spent well over 300 hours on some video games. I love reading, but to me books seem quite expensive as an entertainment medium in comparison with computer games.

There is tons of reading material available for free or for less than ten bucks and the setup costs are nothing (if you want to go e-books maybe fifty bucks). It is rare for me to play a single video game anywhere near 50 hours, let alone 300.

One way to look at it is if you're getting any wisdom from books or video games that you can apply to real life, potentially getting more value from the experience and offsetting cost of acquisition.

...until you realize that we still have this old-fashioned institutions called libraries.

Uber for books, except you don't have to pay.

Indeed! That said, library quality, much like school quality, can vary enormously by geography. Also like school quality, it's not entirely random, there's a pattern where wealthier communities often (though not always) tend to have better libraries.

(I'm defining better as wider and deeper selection of books and ignoring anything else, like other library services, library hours, whatever.)

Technically, it's not free, but you've already paid for it directly if you own property or indirectly through rent (as property tax factors into rental prices.) We pay $120 a year to our public library. We also pay another $100-200 a year in fines, program fees and special requests. This still comes out to well less than $5/book read.

I just finished a couple of books that take approximately 17 hours on average. They cost me $5 each on the Kindle store. Hard to beat $0.3/hr. I also spent a few hours at a LAN cafe yesterday, at $1/hr, which is a reasonable rate here in South Asia.

Of course I could have gone to the library, but I read a lot more if the book is a tap away on my tablet.

I mean if a book is less than 15 bucks it might as well be free, practically speaking, for most people who post here.

I really wish books could hold my attention like video games. I would read a lot more.

You might not be reading the right books? But also -- getting into a reading habit takes a small amount of patience if you are used to the intense stimulation of game.

If your goal is to start reading more often, stop reading so many books you think you ought to read and read more books you want to read. Variety and challenging yourself are good but sometimes you can get carried away and just make yourself not want to read anything.

This is very true. I am usually not the best reader but I recently picked up an excellent fantasy novel and couldn't put it down and ended up reading like 4 or 5 hours straight. On the flip side when I read nonfiction or textbooks it's hard to push myself to keep learning.

Read better non-fiction, then?

In particular, read something that has nothing to do with your job once in a while.

There is apparently a link between our current internet culture and not being able to focus for longer periods: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog...

In short: you should start reading more books if you want books to hold your attention for longer.

If you expect books to grab your attention away from games--not happening. Instead, make a resolution to stop gaming and stick to it. You'll have plenty of time for reading and other activities.

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