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Zooba

After we bought our condo in October 2005, I canceled all of my book club memberships. I thought that living a block from the library would be enough and it was sure to save money overall. I have borrowed a handful of books in the last year but I am not sure I can continue this process.

I checked out two books in December, one a baseball statistics book and the other a mindless thriller from James Patterson. The Patterson book, The 5th Horseman, was in bad shape. Inside, the spine was visibly broken.

Today, I returned that book and checked out two more mindless thrillers, another Patterson book and one by David Baldacci. The Baldacci book is missing the first 22 pages and a huge chunk of the final pages are detached so I have to keep track so they will not be lost.

I could mark this down as a problem with borrowing from both the New Books and Best Selling Thrillers sections combined. These books probably get the most reader traffic, and probably readers who aren’t as careful as others. The books I have checked out that were in their permanent home and with a little age usually do not exhibit this level of wear.

Regardless, I have signed up for an account on Zooba.com again. This is a service run by the Book of the Month Club where you create a queue of books from a large list and they automatically send the top choice available to you monthly for $9.95–that includes shipping. Also, if one book a month isn’t enough, you can Buy Now any at the same price.

I added 63 titles to my list, but I need to go through a lot of the broader categories to find more. Each month new titles are added. It seems as if BOMC uses this to get rid of books that fail to sell to expectations from their line of book clubs. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t find good or popular books here.

I will use Zooba to get my fix of newer or popular books and the library for older titles. And the library will benefit because they will get my bought books once read.