Used-book uselessness

[dr_whom]

There's not a lot that makes me feel more useless than a gift-certificate to a used book store.

I have like $7 left on a gift certificate to BMV, and I was like, well, I've got a long road trip coming up and I may as well buy something to read. And… I wandered around the store for half an hour and eventually left it empty-handed. For every book, I was either like, 'well, I like that book, but I know that because I've read it before, so no need to buy it,' or 'I haven't read that, so I don't know if I'd like it, so I don't know if it's worth buying.' That's what all my bookstore experiences are like. And since it's a used book store, the handful of books that I specifically looked for because they'd been recommended or whatever were ones they didn't have.

I'm just… really bad at bookstores, I guess. They cause me an inordinate amount of anxiety.

Comments

[landofnowhere]

One could use a smart phone to look things up on goodreads, maybe? It seems like somebody could even make an app to do that. Though I don't know if computer image recognition is yet up to the task of "recognize all the books given an image of the shelf", or if you'd have to scan individual bar codes.

(I rarely buy from used bookstores these days, but when I do I'm more likely to get books I read years ago and want to reread.)

[zdenka]

That surprises me, because it's very different from my own bookstore experience and that of most nerdy/geeky people I know. (I'm not judging; I sometimes get anxiety over equally inconsequential things.)

I can't help wondering, how do you ever read new books? Do you get everything from the library first, or only buy books based on specific recommendations?

Used bookstores are great because the prices are so cheap that making a mistake has almost no consequences. Turns out it wasn't worth buying after all? Okay, you're out a few dollars . . .