People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.

That... actually makes sense to me. You're gambling the cost of the book that the amount of enjoyment you get out of it is worth the time it took to read it.

If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that you can sell at a loss to a used book shop.

And you can affect your odds of winning or losing, by going with a genre or author that you already have an affinity to (or not!)

Unfortunately, that definition of "gambling" is so encompassing that it effectively means everything is a form of gambling. Which is, of course, absurd.

I could be said to be gambling that my comment will be read. I am also gambling that someone will not disagree with me. I am gambling that by writing this comment I'm not wasting time that could have been better spent in other endeavors. I am gambling that I will not die of a stroke just after writing my comment, making my final conscious act a pointless one.

If it sounds absurd, that's because it is. Of course it's not gambling, and neither is reading a book.

I sort of mixed up risk and gamble in that analogy. I stand by the part that many games fall on a spectrum between “game” and “gamble”. counter strike, wow, eve online are games with a gambling element: loot boxes, skins, etc. Poker is a gamble with a game element, e.g, bluffing. Slot machines aren’t games at all.

I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.

I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning.

When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet).

Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?

There is no gambling involved in buying a book. I give you $X you give me a book.

Gambling is I give you $X I have a,b,c % chance of getting A,B,C. Usually I get nothing. Nothing I can do can effect the outcome.

Colloquially, you might say "I don't like this author, but the reviews say blah was a blah, so I took a gamble". But that is clearly not the same as pure chance gambling.

Not all "risks" are "gambling"