Louise's thoughts

Buying a book

Buying a book is not as simple as it seems. It is not just taking out your MasterCard and paying for 300 pages of paper with text and sometimes pictures, it is a whole cognitive process of picking out the one you had in mind or had been recommended, glancing through it and evaluating to which degree it will gratify your need. Then comes the great process of actually making a decision as whether to buy it or not. It is always something that takes me long time, because there are so many issues to consider: is the book worth the money, do I have money on my expense account (well not really anymore), will I ever read more than the introduction?

But buying a book involves more complicated measures than even these practical but time consuming actions described above. I realized this the other day when I ended up in a social science section of Borders. I needed a specific book on qualitative research methods by Patton, and since none of the other 3 bookstores had any copies of this, I ended up at Borders, just in case. I found several other books on qualitative research methods but I particular looked into one by Silverman. I decided to give it a cup of coffee's attention and started on page 74 where the author explains the main concepts of theory, concepts, framework, method and methodology. As I was sitting with my skinny latte (that's what they call it here) I realized that buying a book has more layers than I initially thought. The author explained in a reasonable way what he understood by the five concepts and although I have a general understanding of them from studying social science and computer science, it was refreshing to see a tangible explanation of what someone else think lies behind these notions. However, I didn't buy the descriptions as the facts of research. The explanation was simplified and lacked examples, it was not exactly what I needed to know for my research. The positive part was that I am well aware that there a as many descriptions of what theory is as there are researchers and I therefore decided to buy the book for a while until I could create my own notion of the five concepts. Of course I then hope some day, to be able to write insights and descriptions of relevant concepts that other people will weigh and perhaps even buy. In the end you don't just pay money for a book which enables you to take it home, you buy the book or parts of it according to your own interpretation. That is the beauty of books.