What’s the most someone will spend on a book, a normal book?

Lemme nominate Seth Klarman’s Margin of Safety. eBay’s most recently sold copy fetched $729 for instance, and this is fairly typical.

Surprised?

The context is that Seth Klarman has compounded $27 million into $27 billion at his hedge fund, Baupost Group, and this–his only book about it–was a flop on release, so only 5,000 (non-bootleg) copies were ever printed.

Of course, we live in the future so it’s trivially available for free download if you know, ahem, where to look. Owning the physical book itself is mostly the kind of thing finance geeks use to flex on other finance geeks. I think. Either that or it’s all really about laundering drug money, like the rest of the art market.

I think about this book a lot.

Always accompanied by the mad urge, “What’s the most value I could stuff into a single web page?” Purely cash-money value I’m talking here, nothing high-minded and philosophical. What are the highest return-on-investment paragraphs I could string together?

Forget Klarman’s $700 book! I’ll sell single views for $1000 a pop; only Boomer-landlords in the Bay Area will be able to afford it. I’ll market at their NIMBY meetings–Homeless issue? Too many homes is the difficulty is what, folks can’t decide.

I sober up whenever I inevitably realize that society’s collective response to even motherfuckin’ Seth Klarman’s book was–

–and thus it is hopeless.

PSYCH! Here at rs.io, we’re better than society, baby! Let’s do this thing.