I live in a small town, no bookstore, just the rack at the supermarket. Our library has a nice system, though. For your twenty bucks a year you have access to the catalogues of all the small town libraries in the province (our two big cities are snobbish or something, they are not part of this deal), they will ship the books to you, you just pick them up and drop them off at your local library. Due to the weak Canadian dollar, most of the internet sites are off limits to me, paying in U.S. funds gets scary really fast. Between myself, husband and two young teens we go through 20 - 25 books a week. If we bought them all we couldn't afford to eat! Thrift shops and garage sales are also great, and used bookstores when we go to the city.

Skylarb, as most of my books are either for reference or for my collection (Quiz Books and I have them dating back to the 1920's) I don't care what condition they are in they are interesting in their own right. The rummage, garage, car-boot, sales are a treasure trove and in the UK the librarys often have book sales (out of date, damaged etc) - books published originally 30/40/50 ++ years ago can be picked up for pennies/cents/ smallest currency. I have one book (falling to pieces) "Enquire Within" dated 1895 - It has everything you need to know if you were a Lady of the House in those days.(priceless in my view regardless of condition!)

Just an FYI a lot of the online shops are now offering free shipping. B&N's caveat is you have to order 2 ore more items, amazon.com is order over $25--(way to easy for me to accomplish). Amazon.co.uk also offers the same deal if you order over a certain $$ amt. I used to be a bookbuyer for an indie bookstore which went the way of the dodo, so now i resort to using the online shops for their great search engines and tracking. Half.com is great for the cheaper books, but you end up paying more in shipping than you did for the book.

I usually buy my books from a store called !ndigo. They're a major chain bookstore, but they usually have all the books
I want to buy. I never go to Used Bookstores, I don't know why but I always see it as being like the library, which I hate.

I would spend hours in the bookstore, walking around, checking out the books of interest, and sitting down for awhile while
reading parts of a book that I had hoped to buy.

Today I attended a Community Day at a housing estate in a deprived area and they had a bookstall, no other stalls. I wandered across and found virtually new hardback books together with paperbacks, all at the single price of 20p per book (roughly 30 cents) - I bought 20. The books range from a thick hardback cookery book (not for me as I don't bother to cook) to hardback novels and paperback novels, I have enough books to read to last me quite a while especially as I also have the five Harry Potter books to read.