Friday, July 27, 2018

Tax dollars vs. library books: a personal cost-benefit analysis

The City of Toronto's 2017 tax-supported operating budget was $10.5 billion.

The Toronto Public Library's 2017 operating budget was $178.763 million.

$178.763 million / $10.5 billion = 00.0170250476

This means the library's budget is approximately 1.7% of the City's budget.

Therefore, 1.7% of my municipal tax dollars go to the library.

My 2017 property tax levy was $2618.47.

$2618.47 * 0.017 = 44.51399

Therefore, in 2017 I paid just over $44 in taxes to support the library.

 In 2017, I read a total of 55 books from the library.

44 / 55 = 0.8

Therefore, I paid $0.80 per book I read.


In comparison, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 a month, which is $119.88 a year.  The cheapest book on their ebooks "deals" page is $0.99, and the cheapest book on their print "deals" page is $3.90.

So what was my return on investment? 

According to the Ontario Media Development Corporation (the first google result with relevant information), the average list price in 2016 was $19.12 and $12.86 respectively for trade and mass market paperbacks.

55 * $12.86 = $707.30

55 * $19.12 = $1051.60

Therefore, extrapolating from these averages, I got between $707.30 and $1051.60 in value from my $44 investment.

That's a return on investment of between 1607.5% and 2390%.

Considerations:

1. I also use the library for other things, but I can't figure out how to quantify them and don't have any record of frequency.

2. Since I started working from home, I've been reading less (about 50 pages less a day, since I'm no longer commuting and having a clearly delineated lunch break) and using the library for wifi/third place less (since I'm almost always at or very close to home). People whose patterns are more similar to my going-to-the-office patterns would get better value for money than I calculated.

3. I don't know which of the books I read were trade paperbacks and which were mass market paperbacks. Some of them were hardcover, which tend to be more expensive and therefore make my library use even better value for money than I calculated. Someone more ambitious than I could look up the actual prices of all the books I read in 2017 in the print format in which they were available in the month I read them.

2 comments:

laura k said...

Such a bargain, and you use only a fraction of what the library offers.

It was great to see the responses to that stupid Forbes story -- both the quantity and the strength. As I'm sure you know, the writer was forced to apologize and Forbes deleted the story.

impudent strumpet said...

I was so surprised that article even got posted, because the writing style reminds me of when I was in high school and had nothing to say about the assigned essay topic and was desperately trying to make word count. My first reaction was to search for whether Forbes is now hosting personal blogs or something.