Cheap thrills
THANKS to the Internet, cheap technologies, and of course, the Chinese—who have apparently thought of everything (but that’s another story)—films and television shows have emerged as the most inexpensive forms of entertainment. Or at least in countries like the Philippines where piracy is rampant, copying licensed material is tolerated, and enforcement of intellectual property rights is, more or less, a joke. (And a bad one at that, primarily inflicted on the predominantly Muslim sellers of pirated DVDs.)
Although piracy has introduced many excellent foreign shows to local audiences (Battlestar Galactica, for one, which I highly recommend), there are still those who care enough about the written word to actually read, let alone, buy books, despite prohibitive prices.
Take the latest Harry Potter volume.
Only available in hardcover—at least as of this writing—the book costs a lot more than my weekly lunch allowance, beer money, and poker subsidy combined.
But this didn’t prevent many Filipinos from promptly purchasing their own copies. Which is a good thing I suppose.
However since I remain unwilling to risk ulcer, skip drinking, and auto-fold during Texas Hold ‘em night, I have deliberately foregone the experience of owning and reading the last of J. K. Rowling’s series. After all, by now, pretentious, irritating, and insufferable coño kids and their pretentious, irritating, and insufferable coño parents have told everyone that their favorite teenage magician is—warning: spoiler alert—alive.
So instead of spending more than a thousand pesos on a novel whose ending I already know about, I recently decided to indulge in an old habit: that of visiting stores which sell used books.
Financially-challenged Filipinos such as myself have always looked for finds in small establishments such as Book Sale and Limited Edition which put up shelves of books along malls’ empty spaces, hoping to get some business off visitors.
And just last week, while on the way to a meeting, I chanced upon Limited Edition’s two shelves on the third floor of SM Makati.
Located right by the entrance connecting the Metro Rail Transit and the mall, I scoured the bookstands thoroughly, primarily examining non-fiction titles and checking their publication dates to see whether the contents were outdated.
Not long after, I hit the jackpot and bought two books—Maria Bartiromo’s Use the News and an old but nevertheless serviceable issue of Granta’s issue 36 which dealt with Mario Vargas Llosa’s unsuccessful bid to become the president of Peru in the late eighties.
All in all, both books cost less than three hundred pesos and no one has yet told me how each would end.
Now that’s what I call a bargain.
