[silentsanctuary]

I think the article is less making a comment on “how many hours of time you need to put into reading before it’s worth the monetary cost you laid down for it”.

I think it’s trying to remind people that before you get the utility you wanted out of a (non-decorative) book, you need to pay not just ($14.99), but ($14.99 + 10 hours), or indeed ($14.99 + 1 hour).

I understood the article to encourage more thoughtful budgeting of that second kind of cost, and that we are tuned to automatically mostly consider the first kind of cost.

[Tyr42]

But sometimes you want to fill time, as it were. You might buy a paperback before getting on an airplane so that you have a boom to read, not because you care about the contents.