It has been a good week for … bookworms
Owning an early copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or James Joyce’s Ulysses will do more than enrich your mind – it might also boost your bank balance. The value of first-edition 20th-century popular classics has doubled in the past 10 years with Animal Farm worth more than £5,000 today compared to less than £200 in 2002.
Stamp and coin dealer Stanley Gibbons is launching a rare book index of 30 first editions, mostly by British authors. Ulysses is actually the third most valuable book in the index at £24,557, one-tenth of the value of a mint condition copy of Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald which is worth £246,636.
So much for the rise of the e-book, it seems paper and ink has never gone out of fashion.
Not every old book is worth a small fortune but we should still celebrate the huge market for second-hand books that bring the printed word to a mass market. From student text books to favourite classic novels, there is a massive demand out there with stock on every subject to feed our insatiable appetite for words – and at a price for every budget.
It has been a bad week for … video fans
Sony has finally stopped making Betamax video cassettes, 40 years after launching the format. It appears the final chapter of the well-documented wars between VHS and Betamax is officially closed.
The first Betamax recorder cost the equivalent of £5,500 in today’s money and came inside a wooden console with a 19-inch colour TV. What a difference to today’s home cinema systems with speakers neatly fitted into the ceiling and cabling and devices all tidied away in a cupboard out of sight. And nifty hard drives with plenty of storage space means there is no need for drawers full of boxed video tapes.
Remember the days when every family member had their own tape to record their favourite programmes? Now we can back up films and endless box sets at the press of a button with no fiddling around with tricky timers.
Along the way we have lost high street video shops with their eclectic mix of films that never saw the light of day in a cinema, and the agony of the prized tape holding your favourite film or TV show being chewed up by the machine.
Maybe embracing the future isn’t such a bad idea after all …
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