Part 1
Instead of focusing on writing, I’m focusing on reading. That way, I’m always improving my craft. I’ve no income at the moment, so I’ve been looking into cheap ways for reading. I thought, how about book swaps or book exchanges? How about libraries, specifically online libraries because I want to read in English? And finally, online book clubs…
Well, here’s my results of these searches:
Book Swaps
We’ve all see the Instagram posts on these, they’ve never worked before for me because I don’t have enough friends to get any books back. Frustrating!
I found a couple book swapping sites, where you fill out what books you have and people show they are interested, then you send on the books. You receive books by showing your interest in their lists. Simple and smart. BookMooch sounded perfect! Exactly what I wanted, unfortunately the site is old and hasn’t been updated since they changed the ISBN code from 10 to 13 numbers. The next site I thought, “ooh, that’s promising” is bookcrossing, and it is active. However, you need to be in a big city and since I’m in France, most books I’d have access to are French books. The last time I went to a big city was 3 years ago. Not worth my time.
I researched a ton of different sites, there’s one that’s only for UK people and the others were all outdated, forgotten wastelands.
Online Libraries
My local library is a small village library catered to small children. All good and yay for young readers, but, not for me. Also, the only French books I’m interested in are the classics, and they’re way too hard for me to read.
Online library it is. Now, you’d think that by now there would be a decent worldwide online library that you don’t need a physical library card from an anglophone country available, right? Either I’m completely blind, or there’s no such thing. I’ve done hours of research over the years and I can’t find anything.
Open Library, or the Internet Archive, I hear you shout. Turns out you need a recent Kindle to gain access to actually downloading those books… or have the joy of reading on your computer. Which I hate. My kindle is ancient and still works, so I’m not buying a new one until it goes kaput.
Project Gutenberg is great, no doubt about it. Go there for your classics binge fest.
I found ManyBooks which seems promising for my broke self. Every evening I get an email with today’s offers of very cheap books. Now, of course, the conversion from amazon.com to amazon.fr means that the Kindle offer isn’t discounted about 80% of the time. However, they are still at low enough prices that I can consider buying and not breaking the bank.