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Can you please advise whether or not grammatically and meaningfully correct to say "this book is worth the acquisition" when you find a book relevant and want to buy.

Michael Harvey
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user382375
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    It's not particularly idiomatic. Standard phrasing is to say something useful / of value is *worth having. Or worth the [asking] price* in contexts where it's important that it be *good value [for the money]* as well as useful. – FumbleFingers May 08 '20 at 12:06
  • (This book is worth having ) right ? – user382375 May 08 '20 at 12:08
  • Yes, This book is worth having means the speaker thinks it's a good idea for you (and/or him) to have the book, with no implications for whether the price (if any) is "reasonable". But with This book is worth it, the pronoun would usually refer to the price, so that would imply it's being offered for a good / fair price. In unusual circumstances, "it" might refer to, say, the effort or time to be spent reading** the book, so speaker would be saying it would be a good use of your time to read the book. – FumbleFingers May 08 '20 at 12:14
  • I think it's reasonable, though a hair stuffy sounding. – Hot Licks May 08 '20 at 13:03
  • A Google search for << "worth the acquisition" -cost -fort -self >> (I didn't look for further filters) doesn't give an encouragingly large number of hits. 18, as per page 2. Grammatical, but inadvisable (quirky unnecessary choices seldom curry favour). Unidiomatic. In violation of a Gricean maxim. – Edwin Ashworth May 08 '20 at 13:35
  • Related. – tchrist Dec 26 '22 at 16:43

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