Pound for pound,

you can't beat a gift certificate to a used bookstore for value.

Gift cert for $50 to Borders got me:

Lord of the Rings trade paperback
Frommer's Travel Guide to China
Medium mocha freeze drink

Gift cert for $50 to local used bookstore got me:

Shanks Mare: Japans Great Comic Novel of Travel & Ribaldry by Ikku Jippensha
Foreign Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors, and Writers by Lewis Herman, Marguerite Herman
Teach Yourself Cantonese by R. Bruce
Mankind, Nation and Individual From a Linguistic Point of View by Otto Jespersen
A road map of New Jersey
The Wise Man from the West by Vincent Cronin
The Aeneid, Second Edition - Vergil's epic, translated by Frank Copley
A Thousand Pieces of Gold: A Memoir of China's Character in Its Proverbs by Adeline Yen Mah
A Brief History of Chinese Civilization by Conrad Schirokauer
The People's Chronology: A Year-By-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present (A Henry Holt Reference Book) by James Trager
And Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe

Clearly, the used bookstore wins, although I am disappointed to note the absence of science fiction or fantasy from the list of purchases there. This is because the paperbacks of the used bookstore consisted primarily of volumes I was not interested in, and the hardbacks were almost entirely various David Eddings novels. Bleah. Bleah, I say. (To the lack of diversity in the selection, not Eddings. I've always liked Eddings, but not enough to spend my gift cert on hardbacks I've already read.)