I like to read. What I don't like is paying beaucoup bucks to buy books. I really like hardbacks but they are just way too expensive. So I used to just buy paperbacks but the price of those has gotten pretty expensive these days as well.
The logical solution to this problem is the local library, right? Well, that kind of depends on where you live. My wife and I used to live in an unincorporated area of the county outside of any city limits. So, since the county didn't have a library system, our only alternative was to join a city library; but since we weren't city residents we had to pay what seemed at the time to be a fairly steep fee for a non-resident family membership.
We thought that we had overcome that problem when we moved inside the city limits of a small town. Since we were now residents we got free memberships to the city library. The problem with that was that our town, which is growing rapidly, still has a single small library that doesn't have a lot of books or other media. Since the library's inventory hasn't caught up with the increased population it is often the case that books that we'd like to borrow are either not part of the library's inventory or they are out and there is a waiting list for them. Fortunately most libraries are part of an interlibrary loan system. That works differently depending upon where you live. In some states you get access to the catalogs of other libraries in the system and you can request an interlibrary loan of the book or other media you are interested in. Then you have to wait until it gets delivered to your local library or branch so that you can pick it up. We live in Texas, which has a consortium for more less traditional interlibrary loans such as I just described but also has something called TexShare, which uses a little bit different model. In our state anyone who is a member of a participating library can get a TexShare card. If you present that card at a library which is a member of the system (and most of them are) you can get a local library card for that library at no cost to you. Then you can use that library just like any other card holder. So my wife and I used our local (no cost) library card to get TexShare cards and then used those to get local library cards at libraries in other towns with bigger catalogs than our local library at no cost to us. Now we can borrow from any of those libraries. We just have to keep track of which library we have borrowed the books from and when they are due.
Being a library member can save money even when you think you might want to buy a new book. For example, my wife and I recently attended a seminar which was based on a book. The person conducting that seminar mentioned that the book was available online at most of the usual places. We thought we might want to have a copy but, just to make sure, we drove from the seminar to a library and borrowed a copy of the book. After reading through it we decided that we didn't really need it after all. That saved us about $25.
Some of the libraries we belong to have other features that save money. E.g., one of them has a magazine recycling program where members can bring in their relatively new, but used magazines, and put them in a rack where any other member is free to take them home at no charge. We often take home magazines that are of interest to us and then re-donate them so that someone else can use them too.
So belonging to one or more libraries solves the problem of getting cheap access to reading material. The only problems I have with that are that I like to buy books so that I don't have to worry about when they are due back at the library. In addition, I like to buy reference books and just keep them handy. (Yes, even in these days of bajillions of bytes of data available at my fingertips from the Internet I still like to have some reference material in hard copy form. I know that's anachronistic, but that's how I am.) Way back in the golden days of yore I satisfied my craving for cheap book prices by buying them at a local bookstore that sells them for half of the cover price. They also give you a small credit for turning in used books so that offset the cost somewhat. I'm pretty cheap, though, and half price on a $30 book was still more than I wanted to pay. So I was thrilled when a bookstore opened that had new books for 75% off. That just seemed to be too good to be true. Apparently that was the case, however, because that store only lasted about six months and then I was back to paying half price.
About that time I started buying books from online retailers. They usually had lower new book prices, but since I was used to paying no more than half price for gently used books, and getting immediate gratification rather than waiting a week for cheapo cheapo snail mail delivery, I kept on the lookout for something that suited me better.
I heard from a friend that Goodwill stores had used books for a reasonable price, so I started buying them there, but they still charge more than I'd like to pay, so I continued to search for other sources of cheap books.
These days I buy most of my books from the used book stores in the libraries that my wife and I frequent. One of our favorites, which has a fairly large used book store that often has titles that are only a year old or so, charges $3.00 for a hard back and half that for a soft cover. That's pretty cheap but they usually have a monthly special which is almost always a BOGO for some category of books or media that is currently overstocked. So, e.g., you might get two hard back fiction books for $3.00 or a BOGO for any non-fiction book or media. That amounts to about $50 worth of hard covers, often last years titles, for $3.00. That's what I'm talking about! I haunt that book store a couple of times a week.
We have found an even better deal at an independent thrift store in our area. They sell hard covers for $1.50 unless they are very new titles from really popular authors, in which case they charge $3.00.
Since we can buy books so inexpensively these days my wife and I always seem to have ten or twelve books on the “To Be Read” shelf. Of course we end up with boxes of books that we've read and don't plan to keep. Some of them get passed along to friends who want to read them. The rest get donated back to the local thrift store because we feel that, with a cost of only $1.50 per book, more people will get to enjoy them if we donate them there. Everybody wins. The thrift store and library used book stores get to make some money and we get to read lots of good books on the cheap.
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