Friends of the Library Book Sale Returns

My local newspaper The Gainesville Sun has a good article about the upcoming semiannual Friends of the Library book sale, to take place this Saturday through next Wednesday.  The books and media are used and dirt cheap, attracting hordes of hoarders (with their cardboard boxes) from all over the region.  It has gotten to be quite a tradition for me, not that I usually purchase very much here.  But it does paint a stark contrast with how the publishing industry has been headed in recent years.

When I walk into the huge Jacksonville Town Center Barnes and Noble bookstore, I am struck by how the sales section for their electronic Nook reader has taken over a large section of the store's center, appearing to be eating away at the surrounding hard copy paper book displays.  The push is definitely on for customers to abandon paper in favor of readers like Nook or Kindle.  At the same time, there seems to be an increasing popular fervor over old cheap used books, which still completely undersell the electronic downloads.  Besides, there are myriad out-of-print old books still under copyright but which are unavailable electronically.  Some of these can be bought over the Internet, and many are quite cheap.  But nothing beats these used book sales, except...

The library still stands out as the great bargain location for books and media.  Unless you have some kind of obsession about possessing and accumulating books, simply checking them out will usually do quite nicely.  And now you can also download books from the library free of charge electronically, either on your reading device or on your computer.  Good deal, I say...

Still, I will most probably return to the Friends book sale and try to find some remote parking spot, after which I will jostle with the crowds and look for books that are put out for sale without any regard whatsoever for alphabetical order.  And then, of course, after I'm done browsing and am ready to check out, the line shouldn't be too hard to find: sometimes it is so long that it snakes through and around the warehouse-size sales floor!