If you are a reader, you might have noticed that reading is an expensive interest. These days books, magazines and newspaper cost a lot of money. Average price for a book is around $12, a magazine cost about $10 per issue and a newspaper costs approximately $3 per issue. If you subscribe to magazine abd newspaper, you will have to pay over $100 per month. How do you manage to keep your expenses small.
Usually I buy in exclusive deals (I already saved a lot of money by buying it that way) or in places that sell used books (in good conditions, of course ). Another method is to buy through gift cards that I get from time to time from some stores.
There is the library to read magazines and newspapers. If your library is like our library, they've only one daily newspaper to share with so, you got to be patient. The library had cut backs and they have just one daily newspaper. The magazine section is very big so you got choices from scientific to glamour magazines. Our library has a free section of magazines which is generally old magazines, some very old back issues are available for all. The library has some very good up to date free magazines like Generations for the Senior Citizen local news and others. Going to the library for magazines and borrowing books saves lots of money. All you need is a library card. Locally the library issues a first library card for free-if you loose it the second you pay for, I believe it's $5. Libraries has ebooks too.
We have a public library in our place. I am visiting it regularly for my reading, for updating myself of the latest news in the local, national, and international scene. There are so many references to search in various subjects or topics. In doing so, I have saved a lot of money instead of buying the magazines, the newspapers, and books for myself.
I love to read, too, and to save on this hobby, I buy books from Books for Less and similar thrift stores where books, both hardbound and paperback, only cost half dollar. Otherwise, I would borrow books from the church library and read them within four days. Some of the books I've borrowed are actually old books that are no longer available in bookstores but are very interesting like this biography of Marilyn Monroe. The drawback is, no matter how I liked the book, I can't keep them. As for magazines, newly published ones are expensive but if there's an issue that I really like, I'd wait for three or four months to buy them at less than half the original price. I don't feel the need to buy magazines regularly because the internet has a lot of magazine-type free content.