The Finance Corner: Literature on the Cheap

If you have time to read for fun then you are probably not in Law School.

I like to quantify the value of my entertainment expenditures as a ratio between the money spent and the length of the entertainment I receive (I sound like a real ball of fun don’t I?).  The baseline I use, since I am a movie buff, is the current cost of an evening movie (around $10) and the length of a movie (around two hours).  If my spending on some other activity beats that ratio, then I have done well, if not, then I have done poorly.  The expense that has the easiest time beating this ratio is spending money on buying a book.  You can spend very little for a large entertainment time sink if you buy the right book.  That is why I have a large personal library.  However, as a student, money is tight, so there are some tricks I use to reduce the cost of my literary adventures.  If, like me, you enjoy reading and do not plan on having a high paying job for the summer (I am still available if anyone is looking for a hard working intern…) then hopefully the following suggestions to reduce your literary expenditures will help you pay off your bounty to Jabba the Hutt (no, I will not stop the Star Wars references, so there).

Salvation Army

They aren't too happy when you pt a book in the change donation bucket.

The Salvation Army is a great place to get many items at a very low cost: clothing, kitchen goods, shoes, jackets, VHSs, DVDs, and books.  The largest part of my home library has come from the Salvation Army.  The typical paperback price at retail is $5-6, while Salvation Army sells such books for $0.50 – 1.00.  Also, every item in the store is tagged with a price label of a certain color.  Then every day they choose a new price label color that is 50% off that day, so your $0.50 book is $0.25 and so on.  Since the books are used, they are typically worn, sometimes very heavily, but the entertainment value of the books comes from their content, not their appearance, so that should not deter you.  It can be difficult to find the book you want, but if you are interested in mainstream books with wide appeal (Star Wars, Twilight, Star Trek, Lord of The Rings, ect.) it can be very easy to find what you are interested in.  However, even if you are interested in a more obscure title, if you are diligent about checking back at the store on a regular basis, there is a decent chance you will find what you are looking for.  Aside from the wear and tare of books, the biggest downfall of buying at Salvation Army is that though the books are organized by type (fantasy, non-fiction, fiction) they are not sorted by title, so to find what you want, you need to look through every book they have.

Wikisource

Free is always my favorite cost.

Wikisource is awesome.  It is Wikipedia’s answer to open source classic literature.  The works of Robert E. Howard (Conan The Barbarian), H.P. Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhu), and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey) have kept me entertained for free for many hours thanks to Wikisource.  Unfortunately, in the past couple of years, many pieces of literature that were in the public domain have been renewed as Copyrighted works.  However, Wikisource has links to these former public domain works on Wikilivres which is the Canadian Wikisource which uses Canadian Copyright law.

Open Source Classics

Funny that we think that a guy who came up with gibberish words was a genius.

In addition to Wikisource, there are many other sites that host public domain works.  For example, the complete works of William Shakespeare should have enough material to keep you entertained for a while.  The collective works of Edgar Allen Poe make for a nice read on dark and stormy nights.  If you would like to be extremely frustrated by the weirdest book ever written, have fun TRYING to read Finnegans Wake (seriously, I have tried to read this before, while using the companion dictionary and just got burned out, it is too weird).  The lesson to take from this is that there are a tons of open source books and poems out there that are available on a multitude of websites, look around and you will find them.  Google is the great entertainer when it comes to finding something to do.

Used Book Shops

As I mentioned earlier, Salvation Army is great place to buy books, but sometimes you want to be able to get the exact book you are looking for rather than taking only what

Used books just want to be adopted to a good home.

people have decided to donate.  A much easier way to find the book you want for cheap is to try a used book store.  One example, would be Annie’s Book Stop.  Annie’s will buy your used books for cash, or for slightly more in book store credit.  Then you can use your credit to get another book they have in stock.  If you don’t mind giving up your old books then this is a great option.  One neat little trick you can do is to purchase the super cheap books at the Salvation Army and sell them to the used book stores for credit, and then use that credit to get the books you want.  This does take more work but for the very frugal this is a winning strategy.

Of course, not everyone is a fan of reading, but to those people I would just say that they have not found the right author to inspire them.