jock123 Moderator
|
#2 · Posted: 20 Mar 2016 14:12
There's no sense to the "value" of books at all, to be honest - as has been said on here many times before, "value" is only what a given person will pay on a given day at a given time. It always seems a bit bleak to me to think of things just as a commodity, and to rank them on things like scarcity and "worth". The only measures which affects my purchasing is "What is it worth to me?", and, "Can I afford that?".
There will undoubtedly be far more people, say, looking to complete a collection of editions in French, to whom that is the important objective, than who just want books because they are scarce; this will almost inevitably lead to a greater competition for copies of a title in French than in Dutch. It would also be true that there are fewer copies printed in English than in French, but would you immediately call these rarer or more valuable than French ones? Probably not, as there isn't the same demand for them.
I waited and bided my time until I found a copy of Cinquante Ans at a price I could afford, because I wanted to read (rather than just own) it; a Dutch copy would have been far less useful to me, because even if scarcer, it would just have sat gathering dust, as I couldn't read it. It took several years, but I knew what I could afford, and eventually a copy appeared that was within my budget; I paid more than I did for most of my books, but I didn't pay that much more.
All that scarcity in this case meant to me was that the process took longer than normal as there are fewer copies to track down, and only a subset of that in my price-range; it was an obstacle to overcome (although not a great one), not an attribute of the book itself. It doesn't make the book more significant to me, that it isn't one of a great many, it just made it more difficult to get.
|