I used to love to read but when the kids came along, I never seemed to have the time to settle down and lose myself in a good book (ot to watch the soaps or even to have a long soak in a bubble bath) but lately I’ve been rediscovering my love of books.
In my pre-frugal days, I often used to buy books from the Supermarket when we did our weekly shop and as soon as I’d read it, usually in a day or so, it would be relegated to my big box of books under the bed to be transferred into an even bigger box of books in the garage when under the bed got full up. I must have a fortune’s worth of books in my garage!
I’m not a big library fan (for me that is, I do love it for the kids) so I started to buy my books from charity shops and car boot sales, where I find books are so much cheaper that I can buy books by authors I’m not necessarily familiar with as I know I won’t have wasted much money if I end up not liking them. I’ve discovered loads of new authors who I like recently and am always on the lookout for their books on my travels, but I’ve also found another way to get my book fix 😉
I’ve started to use a fantastic website that allows you to swap your books with someone free of charge. The only costs involved are that of the postage and the site recommends that you use second class mail so thats not too bad, certainly cheaper than buying the book new and I’d say it’s comparable to buying it in a charity shop, the benefit being that you can go online to search for a specific book.
The site is Read It, Swap It and you can find it here.
Once you’ve registered, you list the books that you want to swap (dead easy – you just type in the ISBN number and the site does the rest), make a wishlist of the books that you want and the site will then match you up with someone who has one of the books you want and also wants one of the books that you have listed. You can even do kids books 😉
It also has the added bonus of meaning that you’re doing your bit for the environment by buying something used rather than new and lets be honest with books – it doesn’t really matter if its new or used does it.
