If you read my blog on physical books vs. electronic books, you will know that I do the majority of reading on my kindle. Therefore, the majority of my books are sourced from the internet - either from Amazon, from the website for the Westchester County library system or from Netgalley (where I request free books in exchange for honest reviews). But being in a bookstore reminded me of how great it is to pick up and peruse physical books, and how much more serendipitous picking books that way can be.
In the olden days before not just e-readers but also the internet, I picked books mostly by going to the library or the bookstore and just seeing what there was to see. I was practically raised in the public library in my town - my mom was the children's librarian for part of my youth, I volunteered at the library as a page shelving books, and then my first job was also at the library, where I was the only younger person that got to work behind the circulation desk. Growing up, we pretty much only borrowed books from the library, unless we were going on vacation. So in turn I basically worked my way through much of the juvenile fiction section, then the young adult section (which was a lot smaller back then than it is now), and then through large swaths of the mystery and science fiction sections too, with increasing forays into the regular fiction section as I got older. I would find an author I liked and work my way through their whole catalog, look at the books on the new fiction shelf, or just randomly pick up books and borrow them if they sounded interesting. Hey, when it's all free, why not?
Some time in my teenage years, I also started to enjoy buying books, especially science fiction and fantasy books that my library didn't have on their shelves. Another early job I had was working at the chain book store B. Dalton's. Later on, living in the city in my 20s and early 30s, while I continued borrowing books from the library, I bought more and more books - especially at my beloved neighborhood Borders on 2nd Avenue in the 30s. I'm pretty sure that in those days, most of the books I bought were picked at random from the display tables, whether it was a table of bargain books, new paperback releases, or just random piles of chick lit.
At the same time, I started buying books on the internet. Because my stash of books was already starting to grow (see "Confessions of a Book Hoarder"), I mostly confined myself to buying bargain books - looking at the bargain books sections of both the Barnes & Noble and Amazon websites. I also started keeping an Amazon wishlist to keep track of all the books I didn't own but wanted to read, usually either because I had read a review of the book or because someone had recommended it to me. In 2007, I also joined Goodreads, and started using it to help me find books to read based on ratings and recommendations of both my Goodreads connections and general users on the site.
Then, in December 2011, I got my first Kindle, and started reading more and more of my books on there. I switched my Amazon wishlist over to the electronic versions of books, and at some point discovered the brilliant tactic of sorting the wishlist by price each day to see what was on sale for cheap. I also made a wishlist on the Westchester County library website, and cross-referenced it with my Amazon wishlist, because I'm obsessive-compulsive like that.
So for me, at least, the advent of the internet has led me to pick books in a much less spontaneous way. It's definitely more organized though!
And I know, with a massive, massive backlog stash of books to read, the last thing I really need to do is pick up a book just because it has a gorgeous cover and the copy on the back or the book jacket sounds good. But it sure is more fun to pick books that way. Allison and I are both suckers for young adult fantasy and we were laughing at ourselves in the bookstore today - those books definitely tend to have great covers, and even though the descriptions of different books in this category often all sound exactly the same as each other, it still makes me want to read them all! For picking books for my kids, who prefer reading physical books, both the bookstore and the library are definitely better - both for books they see themselves, and for books I suggest to them, it's definitely more fun for them to look at them and see if they look good. The internet wins for buying books for them only when they or I know exactly the book they're looking for, especially when it is a book in a series where the bookstore may or may not have all the books in the series.
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