MEDIUM RARE
Having been reassured that we SSS pensioners would be getting our 13th month pay aka Christmas bonus, I rushed out to the bookstore to see how many titles I could afford.
True enough, books may now be considered the latest luxury. A pocketbook priced at US$16.99 costs ₱951. Books are tax-exempt, and at an exchange rate of ₱56 to the dollar, the math is correct: exactly nine hundred and fifty-two pesos, less one peso, discounted. Still, ₱951 is still nearly double the daily minimum wage. How are college students supposed to enjoy browsing – and buying – in a bookstore?
The book I bought is a paperback, consisting of 278 pages. Softbound, it does not belong in any bestsellers list, it’s fiction and maybe it had been sitting on the shelves during the last weeks or months of 2023. It’s not fiction to say that owning a book is now beyond the reach of most students, even the working ones. And here we are, worrying that schoolchildren do not “comprehend” – such a big word! – what they read. What about their teachers? Can they afford such pricey books now?
No wonder our bookstores are getting fewer and smaller. (Compare them with the bookstores in South Korea, and we’d feel like intellectual pygmies!)
As an alternative to buying a brand-new book, you may have discovered what Manny Sison calls stores that “make reading affordable.” These shops import and sell previously owned books, and because they’re not new, they’re cheap. Even so, they’ve been contaminated by the inflation bug and the weakened peso. What’s more, Manny’s stores don’t carry imported magazines anymore.
There was a time when he could boast that his business needed more container vans entering the pier than the big bookstores. (It was in Manny’s shop in Baguio, of all places, where I discovered Martha Grimes and Colin Dexter.) With the success of Manny’s brand of affordable reading, similar establishments have sprung up. In one such store, the saleslady cheerfully told me that “we sell about ₱10,000 worth of books every day, more on weekends.”
Good to hear! Meanwhile, as your books accumulate, start thinking about donating to a school or your LGU. Let your shelves breathe in some fresh air while making room for new tomes.