Maksu
Excerpted from A Dictionary of Economics edited by William L.Adam Smith: The father of the modern economics who is best known for the Wealth of Nations, has many views on how markets work, and why they're not perfect. Examples are scarce. She says the average word frequency of the English language is 4.14 per 1000 words, so a 1000-word book contains about 64000 different words. If she had a novel that would be hard work. "It's impossible to imagine a novel comprising a billion words, because there are only about a million words in any language. I wouldn't want a novel with 64,000 words in it, because I don't have time to read it." Readers might want to remember that the Oxford English Dictionary dates back to the 15th century and was not in digital format until about 1989.
She compares the process of acquiring a book to be in the library to that of finding a match to a four-digit number, which is notoriously impossible. She says: "If you search for a dictionary you are looking for someone who has a published volume of words. The problem is, it is not published in one volume, it is published in many volumes, over the years." She explains that any book has about 1 million words, with no more than 25,000 on a page. However, "what we like in a book is a sentence, not a page, so it's very common for a book to have a sentence repeated on several pages, maybe 5-10 pages, so each book is effectively 10 million words. You are looking for people who have one million words on their shelves."
But she says the market for books has only changed very little since the 15th century. The main advantage of the bookshop is that there is always a "new book" available for purchase, and the main disadvantage is that most people cannot find what they want.
She says it is difficult to apply a price to the difficulty of reading a work. However, "I can read a book in a day. If I go to a bookstore and buy a book, I can read it over several days, but a book that takes a few hours to read is likely to cost more than an hour of my time. If I want to read a book in a day it will be read at night, and it will cost more. If I want to read a book in a month it will be read during the week, and it will cost more ac619d1d87
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