Saturday, May 17, 2008

Lighten Up - The BIG Dilemma

As you all know, books have a huge impact on my life in the form of new ideas, expenditures, and time spent doing something with the ones that I don't want to keep. There are a fair amount of books that have gone from Amazon to my house to the local second hand bookstore for credit to buy more books. It is a vicious cycle, but one that I have had a very hard time considering breaking.

But, as of today, the cycle is no more! I have joined BookSwim. It is the NetFlix of books. It lets me read what I like (I can even request that they buy books that they don't have), ship it back to them and get something else. I am on the 5 books at any time plan that lets me ship back any 3 and keep 2 at any time. Free shipping, of course. And at $23.99 a month it is FAR cheaper than my current book buying habit - but I also found a "5 for $5 for the first month coupon" to try it out.

I should say that this is not an entirely 'green' change in some ways. The shipping bit is not environmentally friendly. Of course, buying ANYTHING around here suffers from that problem. But it does address the largest component of clutter in my house (I currently have 1 or more books in every room of the house that I use) and solve a time issue (gathering books and getting them back to Bookmans) while still feeding my voracious reading habit.

All in all, I think it is going to be a beeYOUUUUtiful thing! But if it isn't, I'll let you know....

4 comments:

Madelyn said...

hm - isn't this something like a library? ;-)

Angela said...

Not like a library around here. This place actually has CURRENT science fiction!

Madelyn said...

Ah - so you want current??? Picky, aren't we??

Angela said...

Of course! Sci fi is often, believe it or not, a form of social commentary. It doesn't always play well later....