On the outside looking in

This must be a great time to be a bibliophile. Books continue to be relatively cheap here - to my continuing relief. We have the venerable National Bookstore. Powerbooks is also a good option, although I'm not too thrilled that the Pasay Road branch moved to Greenbelt. We now have several specialty book stores like Fully Booked which has turned into my favourite bookstore.

There are also 2nd-hand booksellers, the most popular being Booksale at which I've found several gems. They also sell back issues of magazines, which is a good idea, but something I've only seen here. There's also Books For Less, which is more upmarket than Booksale (and more expensive too, although with a wider selection). Luckily there are two branches in Makati. National bookstore seems to be getting into the act as well, as they've started selling P99 (!) hardbound books, apparently culled from libraries in the states. I don't really mind reading second-hand books, especially if I find annotations and other bits of personal details left behind by the previous owner.

To top it off, free books abound online. Planet PDF's free PDF books offers PDF versions of classics for download. Then there's Project Gutenberg, apparently the oldest producer of eBooks on the web. They have over 12,000 books in the public domain available for download as text files. If you don't like the stark, ASCII-formatted text of Project Gutenberg, Mazarin does something clever with the Gutenberg ebooks: it reformats the ascii text into more readable HTML (often complete with table of contents). These appear to be completely legal downloads.

There are other, shall we say, less scrupulous places to find books online (read: P2P file sharing), but that's a contentious area I won't get into here.

I don't know about you, though, but I find it hard to read books on the screen. Somehow, having a solid book in your hands, feeling the paper and being able to flip through the pages is a more satisfying experience. I usually end up printing these ebooks (I know, I know - I'm killing trees but if it helps I use a really small font and I print back to back ).

Are there any other places you know of where we can find our beloved books?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 06, 2004 at 7:16 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.