Frugal Underground

Saving Money on eBooks

I’m a reader.  In fact, I’m a voracious reader.

I’m also more than a little of a gadget fiend.  I love technology, but I can’t always justify spending the money on a new gadget.   As regular readers may know, last week I went and bought a new Sony Reader at Borders.  I got a good deal on it, I had a coupon so it was $199 rather than $299, but that’s still a lot of money.

So, why was it worth it?

I could go on about the experience of reading on the Sony Reader:  it uses the same technology as the Kindle so it’s much more like reading a book than staring at a screen.  I could talk about the convenience of having 99 books in a device that fits in a cargo pocket on my shorts.

But this being the Frugal Underground I think I’ll focus on the financial justification for buying the device.

The first is the price of eBooks.

Many people complain about the price of eBooks, and some really are overpriced, but there are a lot of sources for free ones out there:  It’s a lot easier to get free eBooks than free paperbacks.  I can go to the Baen Free Library, MobileRead, Feedbooks, or Manybooks and get tons of books all formatted for my Reader.  There may be some overlap, but that still means hundreds of books I can read for free.  It’s better than the library because I don’t have to give them back.

I can also buy eBooks at stores like Webscriptions (which hosts the Baen Free Library), Fictionwise, or Books on Board, often for less than the price of a mass market paperback. Most of the books at Webscriptions are $6 each, and you can buy a complete month’s output from Baen for $15 (which usually means five or six books for that $15).  I can generally find books at the other two sites for about $6-7 (not all, but you don’t get that price on everything in Borders either) and both sites have reward programs.

However that’s not where the real savings comes in:

Buying the Reader lets me save money on bookshelves.

$200 is not that much money for a portable bookshelf – especially one you don’t need to find space for and that can hold as many books as you need.  I could put an SD card in it and it could easily hold four thousand books.  That’s more books than many people read in a lifetime.  I’ve already stopped buying paperbacks, and I’m planning to get rid of a bunch of those I already have.  Getting rid of books will free up space on bookshelves and possibly let us get rid of one.

In the meantime I’m buying my books online through various sites that automatically keep records of everything I spend.  I know what I’m spending on books and I can control it.   I can also search my online bookshelves (or local storage) to make sure I don’t have any duplicate books.

So far it’s working – I’ve even found the time to read six novels in the last week.  Best of all, I’m not grabbing a paperback or two every time I go to the bookstore.