I'm a reader. Most of you reading this are probably also dedicated readers, the sort to keep a particular shelf full with books queued up to read. But lately I've been thinking about how many of the books I've bought over the years have been ones I've returned to, compared to the number which get read once or even less than once and then sit on the shelf. It's not that high but it's probably higher than it needs to be, and it's probably reasonable to say that I've spent thousands in the last decade or so on books that I've only read once.
And then there's magazines. I don't subscribe to many because of laziness, but I likes my magazines, I do. I regularly read the Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Details, Fortune, Business 2.0, Road and Track, Magnet, Men's Health, Dwell, the Economist, Geist, Maisonneuve, Scientific American, Seed... You get the idea.
This strategy is inefficient.
And somehow I managed to forget about libraries until a few months ago. Even then I was just taking out books that I knew I didn't need to own until very recently.
So I've got a new process: Books that I want to read go on my "bookmarks" list in the Ottawa Public Library's OPAC, unless there's a giant request queue for them, in which case I request them right away to get my place in line. After I've read it, I decide whether or not it's worth owning a copy. I suspect for a lot of them I still will want to own a copy, but it'll let me screen out the rest.
For some books the request queue is ridiculous, so those ones I'll just have to decide whether to buy or wait.
One lunch-hour later, and I've got eight requests in and another thirty or so books bookmarked. I feel silly for having waited this long to figure this out!
(I'm not sure how to solve the similar problem with magazines. One step would be to subscribe to the ones I buy monthly, but that feels like a step in the wrong direction somehow.)
Libraries win all the time. :)
They may or may not have the magazines you want in the library as well, but sometimes it's harder to get ahold of them due to longer wait times or shorter check-out periods.
...?
I was thinking more like:
yes.
The one big thing I find that I miss, though, in a library versus a bookstore is the ability to easily browse other books of a similar topic. The library here in Burlington is all ordered by the Dewey decimal system and then by author name. I think Carlingwood was as well. Whereas in a bookstore the books are all grouped by subject. So if you want to find books on a particular topic, odds are fairly certain that they'll all be grouped together. In the libraries I'm familiar with, this doesn't happen. Which has led to the bizarre situation where I'll find a book online, see what other similar books are like it (using something like Amazon)... and then see what's available at the library. Not exactly overly efficient.
I almost want the bookstore type of organizational format married with the library ideas.
On magazines, I have no useful suggestions, either... I subscribe to a bunch and pick up others randomly when I'm travelling or flying.
But if you take, say, Curling for Dummies (796.964 W395), you'll find it around all the books on curling (796.964) which are around the books on ice sports (796.96) which are around the books on ice and snow sports (796.9) which are part of the books about athletic outdoor sports and games (796) which is in the section about recreation, sports and performing arts (790) which is part of the section on the arts (700).
Have you discovered LibraryThing? It puts bookstore shelves and Amazon recommendations to shame. Let's say you enjoyed Linus Torvalds's Just for Fun -- here's what LibraryThing thinks you might like. (That it also keeps track of your own library and can use all of what you own and have read to decide what else you might like is icing on that cake.) On the other hand, you might want to stay away from these!