Disclaimer: This post is only very barely, just kind of a little tiny bit, related to anything in the world of technology. If that bothers you, stop reading now. :)
A while back, someone gave our daughter Kylie a present--a book called If You Give A Pig A Pancake. This slender book quickly became one of her favorites, probably because of the large illustrations on each page.
So we were out doing the weekly shopping on Saturday, and noticed another book by the same author. This one's called If You Give A Moose A Muffin. Knowing how much she liked the other one, we casually tossed the moose book in the cart and proceeded to check out. We get home, and sure enough, Kylie thinks this one's a winner too.
Then last night, I'm entering the shopping receipt into Quicken, and I nearly choked when I saw what we paid for the book--$15.99! Amazon has it cheaper, of course, but it's still not inexpensive...especially when you realize what you get for the money:
32 pages, including the inside cover, and a total of 304 words.
Using Amazon's price, that's about 3.5 cents per word (or 5.3 cents per word for what we paid). By itself, that may not sound like too much. But had my Panther book, at 174,907 words, been priced similarly, it would have retailed for ... $6,121.75 (or $9,270 at 5.3 cents/word)! Zowie! On the other hand, if we could have sold even two or three at that price... ;)
Now, in all seriousness, this is a great book with funny text and wonderful full-page color illustrations, which probably accounts for the majority of the cost. Still, I've learned two things from this. First, always check the tag on a children's book before throwing it in the cart--the thickness of the book is clearly independent from the price of said book. And second, I'm going to put the other "Give A..." books on Kylie's Christmas list right now!