brett and i have decided to go to peru! that's not the funny part though. this afternoon i took the micro to lider mall to buy the lonely planet guide to peru. an easy enough goal. i find the book store, make a beeline for the travel section and fish past a row of spanish books to the lonely planet. check for prices... the only one listed is the one in USD that's printed on the back. $22.95 or something. so i figure... i know books in chile are expensive. so maybe it will cost about 15 mil, which is equivalent to about 30 USD. fine. go to the register, the girl says my total is a little more than 24 mil. FIFTY DOLLARS?!?! for a lonely planet book??
so I'm wondering what the deal is. why are books so expensive?
for starters, chile has a 19% value-added tax on books. what other items have this tax, i don't know. but not food and not clothes. i looked up VAT, but i still don't really understand the economics of it all... but according to wikipedia this pretty much is equivalent to a 19% sales tax. ok. so that accounts for about $4.50 of the extra cost.
in addition, it's expensive to import books into the country and publishing prices are high, too. big deal.
i just don't understand. why on earth would a country make books so incredibly expensive? isn't it prudent to give discounts on books instead of raising prices in order to have a more learned and intelligent society? also, a people that knows more about the rest of the world than populations who don't have relatively easy access to books? seems to me that taxing books so heavily is reminiscent of the communist government that chile had 20 years ago, only because dictators never want their people to know about other places. but of course, i am no historian and certainly no economist.
an interesting blog:
http://c.hileno.com/2007/05/in-defense-of-chiles-exorbitant-book.html
on a happier note, here is the itinerary brett and I came up with today...
maybe if you click on it you'll be able to read it...
also, there is another protest tomorrow! i'm going. i think.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LjRs2AJdgnI/SGxTtkUrGJI/AAAAAAAAAIo/
wBoOBVdJQXw/s1600-h/muralpar8julio2008.jpg
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