Greening Austin Daily

Recycled Reads Visit

2nd August, 2010 - Posted by katherine - 1 Comment

Last Friday I stopped by Recycled Reads, the bookstore of the City of Austin library, located on Burnet road.  The store is a collection of books donated to the store to help the library raise money, and books that the library is taking out of circulation because they no longer need as many copies of that given book, or because a copy is no longer in good condition.  It’s a great place to look for books that were popular a couple of years ago, as well as classics. For example, for recently published books, there were a lot of copies of “Lovely Bones” and “The Secret Life of Bees” and I expect in a year or so there will be a lot of copies of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” after the hype over that series dies down.  And there were a lot of copies of all the great classics. I was really surprised by how nice the store was because I had assumed it would just be a warehouse with unsorted books. But it was set up very similarly to a library and the books had all been organized into categories (“fiction” “biographies”, “classics”, “religion”, “Texas”, “home and garden”, “science”, “young adult”, “children’s”, “sci-fi”, etc.) and there was also a “collector’s section” that had older books with a description of why the book was valuable (limited edition or signed by the author, for example), and there was a collection of old records as well.  Within each category the books were organized alphabetically by author, again, just like the library, making it very easy to find everything.  And all the hard cover books were $2 and paperbacks were $1, so it was a great deal too.  On my way back from vacation I had purchased “Lovely Bones” at a bookstore for $9, but I could have had my choice of several copies of that book for $1 if I had waited.

I ended up buying four soft cover books. I usually like to check out books from the library, but sometimes depending on what’s going on, I may not be able to finish the book before it’s due back, so this is a nice way to pick up some books to have on hand for an extended period. If I like the books I bought, I’ll keep the copies, but if I’m not crazy about them I’ll donate them back.  The library makes money, I get some cheap books, so everyone wins!