Giving New Meaning to Parenting

I was reading a post by Siel over at greenlagirl on buying used books. I read a lot of books. Perhaps a lot of people read her posts since The New York Times just featured an article on New Ways to Make Giving Away Books Less Painful!

I buy a lot of books. I buy a lot of used books because I am poor. OK- I’m not exactly poor but, I do watch my pennies.

While I do find myself at our local library once or twice a month, I often find books I’d prefer to add to my library or at least re-read, resulting in excessive overdue fines and/or a search for the interesting book for purchase. So, I prefer to buy. Used.

Now, I find out that I have yet another great reason
to buy my books used, one I hadn’t really thought about.

Reading pre-owned books is more ecologically conscious. That is, fewer books equal more trees. Never one to claim that we should limit book production (I really dislike e-books for a variety of reasons) I do believe that we can significantly reduce the number of copies of each book, we as a society produce.

Now this seems to have gotten a whole lot simpler. I have been known to haunt used book and second hand stores, cruised garage sales and engaged in the occasional “dumpster dive” in student neighborhoods in search of reading material. This always seems to be it or miss. The Internet, once again, has led to a better way.

For specific titles I log on to Amazon or E-bay and buy used. This seems to work best for “lots” of books – that is a set of titles, other wise the shipping costs outweigh the savings. A few more spots for used books I found are:

Betterworld.com
– Buy or give away books here – features a neat tool where you can enter your zip code to find used book sellers nearby

Eco encore
– allows you to donate your old books and buy used books through Amazon and E-bay.

Paperback swap
- a fairly well established book swapping site.

Abe books and Alibris
– the two largest online sellers of used books.

And finally, I like to contribute to the used book trend by sharing those books that haven’t made the cut to be added to my home library. For years I have been donating books to hapless strangers by leaving them on buses, planes and trains, as well as, in hotel rooms and public spaces. Now Book Crossing.com even gives me a way to track them. Participants can engage of a game of “seven degrees of separation” of booklovers. I’ve yet to try it but, perhaps I will someday.

[tags]used books, paperbacks, recycling, libraries, reading[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Today is a good day, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved