I just got off the phone with a man trying to sell me insurance. He asked me what I did, and I told him I was a writer. “Fiction or nonfiction?” he asked. “Fiction.”
He said excitedly that he had just finished a couple of novels lately, and that he really enjoyed them — “The first books I’ve read in a few years,” he said. I asked him if he read them as paperbacks or eBooks, and his answer completely surprised me.
“Hard cover,” he said.
“Really?” I was astonished. I’m a writer, an instructor of creative writing, and I have a healthy budget for buying books. But I still almost never buy hard covers; I think their prices are far too high. The last hard cover book I got was a Christmas present.
“You plunk down $28 dollars for a hard cover?” I asked him.
Well, no, he admitted. He gets them second-hand from his father-in-law. He doesn’t generally buy books himself.
That made more sense to me.
