Books, Readers & Beyond: #53

I'm going to say this up front: I buy all of my book from Amazon (or a seller on Amazon), Barnes & Noble or Half Price Books. In my experience, independent booksellers usually can't match or beat the price a big retailer can set, so there's no point in shopping at the smaller stores.

1) The closest bookstores to my branch are, of course, the college bookstore and In & Out Textbooks. However, neither of these are mainstream book retailers, so they hardly count. (They also have no real web presence.) Another close bookstore is The Book Attic, which sells new and used books. It has a website which allows users to search books that might be available in the store and gives general trade information, etc. Because of the location of this library, there aren't really any close mainstream book retailers. The closest Borders or Barnes & Noble is anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes away. (These both have extensive websites that have already been discussed in this exercise.)

2) I searched for Janet Evanovich's One for the Money and found it available at most sites. On PaperBack Swap you can get the book for the cost of one previously mailed off book. On Amazon you can buy the book for $11.16 new or as little as $3.73 used. Ironically, HCPL does not have this book as a ebook or audiobook download. (And the HCPL site crashed my internet. Nice bonus.) Because the book is not in the public domain, it won't be on any free sites. You can, however, purchase an audio download of the book on Amazon.

3) I greatly dislike ebooks. I may have a laptop, but huddling under a blanket on the couch and reading a book online is just not the same as cuddling up with a nicely worn paperback. Certainly there are some advantages. A search function could be helpful, the ability to read while unobtrusively sitting at a computer. But there are more disadvantages. You are constrained by power, for one thing. If the electricity goes out, you either go without or use up all the battery power. If the power goes out and you have candles, you can still read a book. Reading a book for an extended period of time on a computer screen also tends to strain the eyes more than reading a regular book.

I suppose there are uses for ebooks, but I prefer the good old paperback, myself.