Why I still buy Paper Books: It is the Same Strategy that Women use with Men

I know that e-books are less expensive and take much less space than paper books. Nevertheless, I seem to be stuck with paper books and I am the first to ask myself why.

I think I found an answer with the book above, that I actually read as an e-book. I was not looking for a seduction manual for men, I was searching for "swarm intelligence" which is in the title of this book but, alas, is never discussed in the text! (this is an advantage of e-books, they are searchable).

I got this book for free as part of my subscription with Amazon and I even read some of it. I didn't find it very interesting: not a bad book, but overlong and saying things that I mostly I already knew. But I got a few ideas from this brief experience and I have to say that I found that the author frames very well the problem he tackles with the example of a restaurant.

Think about this: how do you select your dish from the menu of a restaurant? Florian Willet examines two possible strategies depending on whether the restaurant is expensive or cheap. If it is expensive, you'll be probably very careful in choosing the dishes that seem to be the best and, positively, you won't order more than you can eat, that would be a big waste of money. Conversely, if the restaurant is cheap, let's say it is a buffet, then you have no such worry, you can nibble a little of this and a little of that, try all items and when you are full, you don't care if you left some good food untouched in your plate.

Willet's idea is that these two strategies define how -- respectively -- women choose men and men choose women. For a man, sex is not an expensive choice and the ideal strategy would be to try as many women as possible, one after the other. That depends on how expensive women are and this explains why some men tend to aim at lower social status women -- less expensive in terms of the effort needed. Male doctors, for instance, tend to have affairs with female nurses rather than with female doctors. For women, instead, sex is an expensive choice if related to procreation. So, men are expensive not so much in themselves but for the consequences of the decision. According to Willet, a woman tends to choose a man with the same care that you would expend in choosing the best dish on the menu of a fancy restaurant (if she can).

All that is not especially new, as I said, but the curious thing is that I found myself applying Willet's theory to Willet's book. I would never have chosen it if it hadn't been free, I was just nibbling at it just as if I was standing in front of a buffet. It was the equivalent of a one-night stand with a woman in a faraway town where you just happen to be passing by.

And then something flashed in my mind: I love reading books, but like a woman who can't have too many partners together, I can read only a limited number of books. So I tend to choose books as if I were choosing a dish at a fancy restaurant or as a woman tries to choose a partner for life, or at least for an extended relationship. And that's why I buy paper books: they are more expensive. So, I carefully select what I think is best for me, then I pay for what I buy, and I am committed to reading the book I bought.

I think I'll keep staying with paper books -- economic science tells me that! Too bad it has nothing to do with swarm intelligence