Guide to Buying Books for Little or No Money

An Introduction to Cheap and Free Books

Before considering cheap books, consider free books. After all free is better than cheap. If you need a classic or a work that is now in the public domain, you can download more than 100,000 free ebooks at www.gutenberg.org and its partner sites. While gutenberg.org is my favorite, you should also check out getfreebooks.com and manybooks.net. While an ebook will never measure up to a real book in my mind, ebooks do have some advantages. They don't take up a lot of space, and the search function is especially useful in locating a particular passage.

Of course, you can always borrow books from your local library, although they won't be free if you forget to return them on time, or lose them as I have done a few times. My local library also gives away books at the end of their book sale. I have found a lot of good reading material that way.There are also several sites on-line where you can swap books for free. These include swaptree.com, paperbackswap.com and titletrader.com. But these books really aren't free as you will have to pay postage to get them. In some communities, you will find reading groups where people swap books with each other. For example, in my city there is a sci-fi group that meets every Sunday to discuss science fiction and fantasy and to swap books with one another.

Where to look for good books that are cheap but not free will depend in part on whether or not you are looking for a particular title or just browsing for titles that might interest you. It will also depend on whether you are looking for books that were just published, books that have been remaindered, or used books.