Book Bargains!

Books are one of life's greatest pleasures! With a good book in your hand it is nearly impossible to be bored or lonely! Books are wonderful to share with others and with likeminded friends it's quite economical to get into the habit of trading libraries so that there is always plenty of fresh reading material on hand.

If you live in a metropolitan area you may be very familiar with your local library. Many regional areas have great library resources too, often with a mobile library van run by a fellow booklover who is happy to source reading material for you by title, author or area of interest. The very best thing about public libraries is the cost: ususally free to join, free to borrow and an inexpensive place to buy preloved books when they a huge cleanout - sometimes twice a year!

Here are some thoughts on sourcing great value pre-loved books!

• Sharing books with friends or family! You may like to even start a reading group to regularly get together and discuss what's between the pages! There is always great satisfaction loving a book so much that you can't wait to share it with someone else who'll love it too! Be sure to keep a good record of who you borrow from and who you lend to as it can be easy to forget where books belong!
• Your local public library! It's free and many have a booking system where you can nominate to be informed when a book you are dying to read gets returned ready for you to borrow.
• Op shops and garage sakes can be the surprising place for some wonderful books at great prices. Keep your eyes open and you might just find something very interesting indeed!
• See if there is a Lifeline Bookfest in your capital city. I know that there is one twice a year held in Brisbane and the number of books available can only be described as mindblowing. Thousands and thousands of preloved books painstakingly ordered into categories and as cheap as chips. If you can get there, be sure to take along a grandma-shopping-bag trolley!
• If there is a specific title you are chasing, try ebay! There is a good chance that you may find someone selling a gently read copy and of course it never hurts to look.

The joy of reading can be a very inexpensive past time which provides hours of vicarious enjoyment. If it's been a while between books, I challenge you to redsicover the wonderful world of words and share here any other ideas you have for finding good value reading material!