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Testro
May 2, 2009
I find individual library situations quite fascinating. I would never think of a library as having limited stock (so, obviously, my experiences have been fortunate!). My local library has more books than all of the bookstores in the area put together (it has tens of thousands of books), and does a great job of buying both the obscure and the popular.

Libraries are wonderful, because you can dip your toes into any book, any genre, any writing style etc with no purchase risk...it's all for free.

I fear that libraries are deserted by many people for convenience reasons...not just the e-book market, but the fact that people would rather pay £3 in Tesco and don't have to remember to return it. If you're only reading a handful of books a year, which is what most people do, it's viable financially but you end up limiting your reading without even realising it.

I think if you're an aspiring author, a library card is one of the most valuable things you can have. I was surprised (having always thought that I was a big reader) at just how little I was reading after graduating from university, so I have made a conscious effort to read more, and I rattle through at least a book a week now. Deciding to read more is the best thing I've done in years.

I costed my reading habit up and to have bought all the books I read last year, it would've cost me several hundreds of pounds...and I don't think I'd have been as adventurous with my choices had I been purchasing the books.

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Testro
May 2, 2009

Tiggum posted:

I usually read the sample chapter(s) of ebooks from Amazon before buying them.

Even if you read a lot, books are pretty cheap. $5-$20 for a book as compared to $60-$90 for a new video game or $15-$30 for a film at the cinema. Or even compared to $2-$4 for a coffee. And if I'm short on cash I switch to public domain books from Project Gutenberg for a while, or stuff I've already bought and not read yet. I never finish a book and don't start another one.

I just don't even think about the cost of books, really. They're cheap entertainment that doesn't really make an impact on me financially. If I hadn't spent that money on a book I'd just have spent it on some other form of entertainment. Or worse, snacks.

psychopomp - great stuff, I hope your library service is a good one!

Tiggum - I know my post came after yours and referenced a bit of what you said, but it wasn't a criticism of you and your book buying methods. A lot of what I wrote was more in relation to people who buy hard copy books (particularly from supermarkets - I totally understand why people buy from supermarkets, but I think there's a myriad of problems with doing so); e-books are a different kettle of fish, really.

However, "proper" books are pretty expensive in the UK (ignoring online shopping for a moment). A new hardback at RRP will clock in at around £20 and paperbacks are usually £7 or £8 at RRP. Obviously, you can get deals on books (3 for 2 or "buy one, get one half price" are both common), but usually the better deal you get, the worse the store's selection of books. I see books a bit like free-to-air series television - I watch a series/read a book for free, and then if I like it, I invest in the DVD boxset/buy the book to keep. As someone who's grown up as a library user (and without much money!), it would never occur to me to buy a book before I know I like it.

Another thing that's got me back into the library habit is that I realised that I could realistically read 50 books a year, and if I'm lucky, will get the opportunity to do so for another 50 years. That's only 2500 books, and my local library holds about 25 times that amount - and they're adding to the stock every day! It made me realise that I'll only ever scratch the surface of the literary world, so I stopped re-reading books and have actively sought out new authors instead.

I will add that I am aware that I've been very lucky where I've grown up, and I've always had access to a great library service, with up-to-date, well looked after and relevant stock - and I think your own experiences in a library will always colour your feelings towards them.

Testro
May 2, 2009
I think Mr Belding has misremembered the advice, which usually goes:

When people say, "I didn't like that part," they are almost always right; when they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

The point is that lots of readers have a good idea of when something isn't working, and if they can tell you exactly why (i.e. "because..."), that's really useful. However, they're still readers, and not writers, so you shouldn't just copy and paste their corrections into your document and think that you've solved your problem - you should see why they didn't like it, and work out how to solve it yourself.

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