Books pricing themselves out of reach?

[woodelf]

What a ridiculous statement.

Your problem is that you make a number of assumptions that aren't necessarily the case. First, you assume that the lowest possible price will cheat the producers or gut the community. Second, you assume that the "something" in question isn't inclusive of maintaining the producers or the community. If the "something" that someone is after is "a low cost book but requires it be from a bookstore in order to support them" that doesn't prevent them from shopping around from a number of bookstores to find the lowest price.

The short-sighted and/or narrow-minded view is in how you read the statement, not in the statement itself.

Yeah, you're right, i wasn't thinking in that mindset. Or, more accurately, i presumed the person i was answering wasn't. If you define "as cheap as possible" to include clauses like "without poisoning the evnironment" or "while shopping locally" or any number of other ethical consumer criteria. Though, i suspect most people when they say "as cheap as legally possible" mean just that, with no implied clauses--after all, if there are further conditions, why not include them along with legality in the phrase? It sounded like the question was genuine, so i gave a genuine answers: there are reasons, other than illegality, to not buy at the lowest price available, and they broadly fall into two categories: ethical, and pragmatic.

However, i did not assume that the lowest possible price will violate such principles--i said it frequently does. And, at least in the US, that is a very reasonable statement--considering the %age of purchases that go through WalMart and fast food joints, or involve migrant-labor-picked produce, alone, means there's a lot of it going on. Yes, i'm imposing my morality on those purchasers--where "my morality" is definide as the Golden Rule. I'm making a wild leap and assuming that most people shopping at WalMart wouldn't want to live under the conditions that most people who produce the goods sold there do.

 

[Mark]

Yeah, you're right, i wasn't thinking in that mindset. Or, more accurately, i presumed the person i was answering wasn't. If you define "as cheap as possible" to include clauses like "without poisoning the evnironment" or "while shopping locally" or any number of other ethical consumer criteria. Though, i suspect most people when they say "as cheap as legally possible" mean just that, with no implied clauses--after all, if there are further conditions, why not include them along with legality in the phrase? It sounded like the question was genuine, so i gave a genuine answers: there are reasons, other than illegality, to not buy at the lowest price available, and they broadly fall into two categories: ethical, and pragmatic.

However, i did not assume that the lowest possible price will violate such principles--i said it frequently does. And, at least in the US, that is a very reasonable statement--considering the %age of purchases that go through WalMart and fast food joints, or involve migrant-labor-picked produce, alone, means there's a lot of it going on. Yes, i'm imposing my morality on those purchasers--where "my morality" is definide as the Golden Rule. I'm making a wild leap and assuming that most people shopping at WalMart wouldn't want to live under the conditions that most people who produce the goods sold there do.

That's why my statement is about a "something" and not about a "book". The problem you bring to the table is your disallowance of other people to define that "something" for themself in varied ways while assuming that others will bring the same morality as yourself to the process of defining. What others might consider acceptable shapes that "something" in ways that you might not find acceptable. I'm not so quick as to assume I can define the frequency, so I won't make debate that with you other than to say that I doubt you can define the frequency any better. That, you'd have to back up. Reasonable? Again, that's a factor that can fluctuate from person to person when defining their "something". Wild leap? Yes, that's really the problem here. You're trying to force definitions into my statement in an effort, it would seem, merely to debate it, for whatever reasons you may have. Even though you might not think a cigar is just a cigar (and it is), I'm afraid you're trying to spark up in a no smoking area. Ain't gonna happen.