My parents instilled in me and my brothers a habit of reading since we were very young, but we were often discouraged from buying books until the Scholastic book catalogue came around at school. Then we were allowed to buy as many books as we wanted. The rest of the year, we got our books from the school library or the public library, and sometimes we’d spend hours at the local Barnes & Noble reading the books we wanted to buy (but wouldn’t buy).
To this day, I’m not in the habit of buying books. I hardly ever reread books, so logistically, to save space and money, it makes sense for me to not buy books. Instead, I…
Borrow books from the library
Gee whiz, you don’t say? For most of my life, I’ve always been a part of two libraries: my school library and my local library. Now I’m not in school anymore, so I’m only a part of my local library. Although a local library may have more selections, school libraries have more availabilities, at least in my experience. Like, c’mon, how are all 70 copies of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng currently checked out of my local library and all its branches?? I suppose a lot of people live in a city.
Borrow ebooks through Libby
Libby is an app I recently discovered for library ebooks and audiobooks. However, since it gives me access to ebooks and audiobooks from my library, I’ve similarly found that most of the titles I’m interested in often aren’t available and have waitlists weeks or even months long. Becoming by Michelle Obama currently has a waitlist of six months, o boi.
~Find~ books online
The majority of books I read are ~found~ online. Not sure that this is the most, well, legal method, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I google “[title] [author] epub download vk.com.” Hopefully I didn’t jinx it. Sometimes I’ll switch out “epub” for “pdf” if it doesn’t yield any results and I’m desperate, and if that doesn’t work, I drop “vk.com” to open up the search, but vk.com has almost everything. From my understanding, vk.com is Russian Facebook and somehow they have all the books. But you didn’t hear that from me…
Receive egalleys to read and review
The second most common way I get my hands on free books is by receiving egalleys to read and review through NetGalley. NetGalley is a community of publishers, authors, and reviewers who work together to share upcoming releases. Anyone with a platform (other than/in addition to Goodreads, like a blog or Youtube channel) can be a reviewer. As a reviewer, you can receive egalleys to review before publication, which is suuuuper cool. All you gotta do is browse available titles, request ones you’re interested in, and wait for the publisher to approve your request!
So those are all the ways I get free books. I mostly use the last two methods and read books via iBooks or Kindle on my iPad. But lately, I’ve been really tempted to buy books. I blame all the bookstagrammers I’ve been following haha. But I don’t just want books for photos or aesthetics. I genuinely love the feel of having a physical book in my hands and flipping through the pages, without the crinkling of the library’s plastic protective cover; sometimes a physical book is much more immersive than reading digitally, speaking of which, I should probably stop reading books on my phone, as convenient as it is; and it feels good to be offline, moments which are far and few between. Buuut chances are, after I read a book, I won’t look back to it, so I feel like I probably shouldn’t buy books and have them lying around.
(Currently, the only books I own in my apartment are The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Christmas Stories and Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I found The Luminaries in a secondhand bookstore and couldn’t resist, I impulse bought The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories at The Strand, and I couldn’t ~find~ Becoming online and the waitlist on Libby was six months so I bought the book instead. Christmas Stories and Reprinted Pieces and Little Women are both vintage copies I bought at secondhand bookstores.)
I pretty much just wanted to pop by the blog with this post to ask what your book buying habits are. So, how are they? (: Is anyone torn like I am?? Anyone have advice for me??