The exception is books! But first, a bit of history…

It all started with cable’s “On Demand”-type offerings (most cable companies had and have that), then HBO with premium movies, and now a whole Jurassic menagerie of streaming services and streaming bundles, a business so lucrative that even Disney jumped in and now competes with other streaming T-rexes. Expensive movie subscriptions, anyone?

And those video games! Lawsuits have been lost or won about who owns them and who can sell them, and they’re so popular that there are people now who make a living treating other people addicted to them. Big business creating cottage industries?

Your ordinary family movie matinee afternoon followed by dinner for four, even at McDonald’s, can easily cost parents $100 or more. That’s a hit on the old family budget!

Entertainment is big business in America, and Americans are willing to spend big bucks to get it.

What’s missing here? Books and reading! I still just make do with regular cable, mostly because I like to keep up on the news (CNN and network news) and PBS shows (new ones for the latter seem to have disappeared with Covid, though). But sometimes I look for a movie in the “On Demand” catalog, but I generally back out of there fast!

As Mr. Biden says, here’s the deal: Let’s say an “On Demand” service charges $3 for an old flick that I’ve missed (more chances for that now with Covid), and that movie lasts two hours. For $3, I can download a damn good novel that will take eight hours to read, say. In other words, for the same price, I get four times the entertainment! And that book is usually far better entertainment. Movie scripts nowadays are notoriously bad, often with no plot or interesting characters, just a lot of special effects. It’s incredible that I can buy a well-thought-out novel for $3, a story that’s almost guaranteed to be more entertaining than most movies.

Of course, I have to be selective, but I am for both media choices, and that’s another plus for books: There’s a lot more selection! There are more books because it doesn’t cost $100 million-plus to make a book. And with the book’s blurb and a “peek inside” (most online book retail sites have these features, and you use them also as you browse in a library, where a book is zero cost to you), I can home in and find a very entertaining book. Movie trailers all too often just show the few good parts of a movie, so I’ve learned to distrust them (same for book trailers, of course, especially James Patterson’s).

Conclusion: The best entertainment is found in books; the least expensive entertainment is found in books. Books are better. Period. Go out and spend a lot on other entertainment if you like. I’m sticking with books!

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Oktoberfests. I think my only mention of them is in Death on the Danube, and that only occurred as a reasonable facsimile at the beginning of Esther and Bastiann’s honeymoon river cruise (the beer gets to Bastiann, though!). We actually took the cruise that novel is based on in October through multiple European countries, so the reader can see most of what we saw by riding along with those two lovebirds. We didn’t have a murder on our cruise, of course, and there was no Interpol agent like Bastiann around to take over the investigation if we’d had one! This novel is in the middle of the five-novel “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, forming a bridge between the first two more international books and the last two, where the sleuths solve crimes on Esther’s home turf. Available in ebook and print format.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

 

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