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Stop me before I buy again!

Written on: August 13th, 2009 by: in News, Reviews

You can admit it, it’s OK— it used to be so much easier to buy from Amazon or Barnes and Noble than to go to the library to pick up that book you’d heard about or seen a great review for.

A lot of people are thinking twice about that now! It’s been the case for a long time that many (if not most) purchased books languish unread- more than 30% are categorized as “impulse buys”*- and 40% of books are purchased by people earning less than $35,000/year, so with money tight and people looking to make everyday savings without sacrificing quality of life.

If you make a lot of book purchases on-line, wouldn’t it be handy to have a convenient way of seeing if your local library has the book you’re considering buying? The average online purchase costs around $10, and the average U.S. consumer spends a little over $100/year on books, so even if you find half of the books you’re looking for in your library (a pretty conservative estimate), that’s an extra $50 for no-whip vente mocha lattes.

I stumbled across this nifty bookmark recently at the Des Plaines Public Library website. It’s a simple piece of code that you save as a bookmark (or you can click, hold, and drag it to your bookmarks toolbar). When you’re looking at a book on a site such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s or several other bigtime online retailers, you can simply click on your BookChecker bookmark, and a pop-up window will show you if the book is in the Delaware Library Catalog- then you can place a hold on it or go visit the library to check it out.

• DLC BookChecker (left click and hold, then drag link to bookmarks and release)

We’ve had the LibX browser extension available for a while for Delaware Library Catalog users- it’s somewhat more powerful than BookChecker because it can be used to search a wider range of sites and will automatically insert links to our catalog into webpages as you are reading them. It’s a little more complex to install though, but if you are interested you can read more about it and download it here.

*stats courtesy of Bowker- check out the online presentation below or here:

4- Making Information Pay 2009 — GALLAGHER, KELLY (Bowker)