One way to look at it is if you're getting any wisdom from books or video games that you can apply to real life, potentially getting more value from the experience and offsetting cost of acquisition.

...until you realize that we still have this old-fashioned institutions called libraries.

Technically, it's not free, but you've already paid for it directly if you own property or indirectly through rent (as property tax factors into rental prices.) We pay $120 a year to our public library. We also pay another $100-200 a year in fines, program fees and special requests. This still comes out to well less than $5/book read.

Indeed! That said, library quality, much like school quality, can vary enormously by geography. Also like school quality, it's not entirely random, there's a pattern where wealthier communities often (though not always) tend to have better libraries.

(I'm defining better as wider and deeper selection of books and ignoring anything else, like other library services, library hours, whatever.)

Uber for books, except you don't have to pay.

I just finished a couple of books that take approximately 17 hours on average. They cost me $5 each on the Kindle store. Hard to beat $0.3/hr. I also spent a few hours at a LAN cafe yesterday, at $1/hr, which is a reasonable rate here in South Asia.

Of course I could have gone to the library, but I read a lot more if the book is a tap away on my tablet.

I mean if a book is less than 15 bucks it might as well be free, practically speaking, for most people who post here.

There is tons of reading material available for free or for less than ten bucks and the setup costs are nothing (if you want to go e-books maybe fifty bucks). It is rare for me to play a single video game anywhere near 50 hours, let alone 300.