Disparity in Book Costs in Guyana

Last week, I did some exploration of Georgetown, Guyana to see what is available in the capital of Guyana. This lead me through various areas of Georgetown - some which Peace Corps volunteers warned me not to go into alone. However, having grown up in Trinidad and Tobago, I find Guyana familiar - and my 'Trini accent' allows me to blend in. So off I went - even going to a wake for a friend's grandmother who had died in Triumph.

But you don't learn too much about a city unless you go to the bookstores, and I love bookstores. The majority of bookstores I found were more destitute for English books than some of the farmacias in Panama, with most having a selection of novels that could be counted on one hand. I did find, through asking around, one of the better bookstores - Austins - which had the best selection I have come across since I got here. But it's here, also, that I noted some strange things with book pricing.

The Prices of Books

The first section I went to was the Computer Section - consisting of one 5 foot by 4 foot shelf of books. The prices were quite reasonable - around $1500 Guyanese dollars ($7.50 US) could get you books on designing usable web interfaces, or learning HTML. There were no books on Linux - or magazines for that matter - but there also wasn't much in the way of Microsoft related texts. Bipartisan computing was shoved aside for theory and practice on platform independant computing: basically, web related. I was impressed with this, and leafed through the usability book which was easy to read and informative.

Off I wandered - to find that the selection of novels at Austins' was larger than at other bookstores, but was by no means a shrine to modern literature. There were maybe 20 novels to select from - putting the best bookstore I have found in Guyana so far on par with the Panamanian farmacia English selections. Off to see the literary books - out of curiosity - and I fell into shock.

Literature texts were costing about $2500 Guyanese dollars ($12.50 U.S.) - some of which were obviously necessary for school. The Gutenberg Project has many - if not all of these texts - available at no cost; literary classics. Why the disparity? Why is it that an intermediate text on computing theory costs more - almost twice as much - as a literary classic such as Treasure Island?

I've actually been considering running an advertisement in Starbroek News about the Gutenberg Project and Wikipedia as resources for students... probably costing about $25 U.S. for the week. I'll talk it over with a few people, but intuitively it seems that students could get these books cheaper if they just printed them out on a computer. And advertising is where open content has been falling down...

Oddly enough, I picked up a book by Vandana Shiva on Intellectual Property at Austins'. One would think...