Taking Advantage of Your Public Library

{ January 14th, 2008 }

My change in commuting habits has left me scheming how I can maximize my one hour commute to increasing my knowledge and personal well being. The first place I thought of going was the bastion of free and public knowledge - the interne … public library. I gave it some thought and came up with a strategy to turn those stacks and stacks of books into money in my pocket, or least money not out of my pocket - both on my commute and beyond.

Read free books - this one is so painfully obvious I thought it would completely discredit this list if I didn’t include it here. You can check out tons of books at once (something like 50,000,000 at any one time) and even if half of them aren’t that good or the information in them is out of date you don’t have to worry about all the money you paid for them.
Rent movies - the war between Blockbuster and Netflix won’t generate anything as generous as what you get from your public library. If a film was wildly popular, won some type of award, contains a cast that has been dead for 20 years, or has a bunch of zany Australians telling you to “Move Your Arms Like Henry” your library probably has it. This is definitely a money saving tip for after the commute as buying/inventing a portable VHS player would probably cost me a pretty penny.
Build a respectable CD collection - that is right, you can listen to hours and hours and hours of music from your public library. I’m not sure what the law is on who exactly owns the WAV files on those babies, but I’m sure your iPod doesn’t care either way.
한국어를 배우십시요 - Babel Fish tells me this translates into English as “learn Korean,” and I think that this is an awesome idea for using your public library to your advantage. My local library has tons of audio/visual material that can teach me anything from Farsi (*drool*) to Japanese to German. I love learning new grammar … if only I could memorize vocabulary.
Get free video games - this one shocked me when I saw it in the media stacks. I could have forgone the $1.95 for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 and checked it out for free at my library. Other games of note: Scrabble and Oregon Trail.

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