[yeahbutbut]

They could be a shelf full of $2 novels. Owning a few hundred books doesn't cost very much (thanks printing press), and only implies an interest in reading not in being of a high socioeconomic status.

[bpchaps]

Yeah, that's the case with my family. I was in the "lower middle class" when growing up, but we had a library completely filled with books. Most of them were cheap, used books, or were just collected over the years.

In context of the article as anecdata, I don't think the books themselves had anything to do with mine or my brother's successes. We never even read any of them. It was more of a reflection of what my parents were interested in, which obviously had effects in how we were raised.

[chongli]

Owning books is not the hard part, it's reading them. Reading a novel takes a lot of time and is a singularly self-centered leisure activity. People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time. Heck, the image of a person lounging with a book has a very strong cultural link to (non-working class) status.

[barry-cotter]

The average American watches three hours of TV a day. They are not lacking for free time to read books if they wanted to.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch...

[thaumasiotes]

> People lower on the SES spectrum generally lack for leisure time.

Where did you get this idea? It's certainly not accurate in the US.

[userbinator]

This makes me wonder if ebooks have the same effect --- because these days, owning a few thousand of them or more, although perhaps maybe not completely legally, is nothing more than the price of an Internet connection.

[TheMagician0]

I too wonder about this. Having read from physical books most of my life and switching to ebooks/PDFs (reading from laptop or iPad) was not as fun/convenient as I thought it would be. Although saving resources, the feeling I get when holding a book and writing in it (jogging down thoughts or deriving equations) are irreplaceable by electronic files.