Actual savings: The public library

A while ago, I read an article online—I forget exactly where—about the many benefits of visiting your local public library and all the things it has to offer besides books. (It wasn't this Money Crashers article, but it was along the same lines.) I was entirely in agreement with this, since next to our Twitch subscription (through which we watch our beloved Critical Role), our local library is our primary source of entertainment. We check out books, borrow movies and TV shows on DVD, and attend the occasional free event there. It's probably the nearest thing either of us has to a "third place."

But some readers, it turns out, don't share this view. In the comments at the bottom of the article, one sourpuss groused that the library isn't really "free" entertainment; you have to pay for it with your tax dollars, whether you want to use it or not. Apparently, he did not consider this a good value.

Now, it seems to me that if you have to support your public library whether you use it or not, it makes sense to use it as much as possible and get your money's worth. But perhaps this fellow's beef was that he doesn't think the services the library provides will ever be worth what he spends on it in taxes. Is he right? Just how much does a public library really cost, and how much value does it provide?

For our local library, the first question is easy to answer. A copy of Highland Park's municipal budget, available on the town's website, reveals that 0.97% of our property taxes go to support the library. The budget says this works out to $114 per year for the average resident, but our house must be a little smaller than average; we paid about $7,110 in property taxes over the last fiscal year, which means we only spent about $70 to fund the library.

Here's what we get for that:

• Borrowed books. First, and most obviously, we take out books—actual printed books—from the library. My account on the library's website doesn't include a record of what I've borrowed recently, so I'm just going to assume conservatively that Brian and I take out an average of one book per month. If we bought these same books new, in paperback form, they'd probably cost an average of $12 each. So, for borrowed books alone, that's a $144 value.
• Discounted books. In addition to borrowing books, we regularly buy them at the library's annual sale, at which donated books are sold at rock-bottom prices to raise money. Here's our haul from this year's sale: six small paperbacks (which would cost about $10 apiece retail), four larger ones (about $14 retail), and four hardcovers (maybe $20 retail). So this whole stack would have cost us $196 at a bookstore, and we paid only $22 for it—a savings of $174.
• E-books. In addition to physical books, we regularly use our library card to take out e-books from the eLibrary. Here, again, I don't know the exact number we've borrowed between us in the past year, but I'll guess it was at least half a dozen. Kindle books typically cost between from $3 and $10, so figure an average of $6.50. On top of that, our library temporarily gave us a subscription this year to Hoopla Digital, with an allotment of four borrows per month. We didn't get too much use out of it before the library canceled the program, but Brian took out eight graphic novels that would probably have cost him $12 each to buy in a store. So that's another $135 worth of reads.
• DVDs. Our town no longer boasts a video rental place, but we've hardly missed it thanks to the large and eclectic collection at the library. Matter of fact, its selections are probably of more interest to us than what we could have found at Blockbuster back when it was still operating in our area. It has everything from superhero movies to indie and foreign films, plus complete runs of all sorts of interesting TV series—some current, some canceled, and some BBC productions you can't easily get in the USA. We take out at least a couple of selections a month, usually TV series, thereby eliminating the need for a Netflix or Hulu subscription that would cost us $8 a month. So there's another $96 a year saved.
• Live events. Lastly, we attend live events at the library from time to time, such as film screenings and poetry readings. For the most part, these aren't events we'd pay to attend if they weren't available for free, but they make a nice change of pace from staying in and watching TV or playing board games. Most recently, I took an afternoon class that taught how to use a sewing machine, complete with the materials needed to construct a small zippered pouch. Mine didn't quite come out beautifully (I forgot to put the foot down at one point after re-threading), but it's still sturdy enough to hold pens or dice. I checked online to see what a comparable class would cost, and I found a two-hour session at a place in Brooklyn called Make Workshop for $80. So that's another $80 to add to the year's tally.

All told, in the past year our library card has saved us approximately $629 for a mere $70 in taxes. That's such a good deal that we actually feel a bit guilty about it, so we voluntarily pony up an extra $100 each year as a donation and consider it money well spent. If it enables the library to continue providing the kind of value we get from it now, it's an excellent investment.

In fact, if you look at it in terms of cost per hour of entertainment, the library is just about the best deal around. Since I not only read books but also read them aloud to Brian, a single novel can provide anywhere from 2 to 20 hours of entertainment; if you figure 6 hours on average, the 40 books we got from the library this year (borrowed, bought, and downloaded) provided us with about 240 hours' worth. Our DVD borrows, since they're mostly TV series with multiple episodes, add at least another 150 hours or so, and the events we attend add maybe 10 more hours per year. So that's a good 400 hours of entertainment, and even with our additional donation, it costs us only $170—less than 43 cents per hour. That's cheaper than a Redbox rental ($1 for 2 hours), cheaper than a Netflix subscription ($8 a month for about 10 hours), cheaper than most secondhand books (about $4 for maybe 6 hours)—cheaper, in fact, than almost anything you can do for fun.

Now, I realize our public library is probably better than most, especially for a town this small. But then, others that are cheaper probably cost even less in taxes, so the locals are getting what they pay for. In short, I'd say anyone who thinks a public library isn't a worthwhile investment either hasn't done the math or just doesn't know how to have fun.

Visiting the eLibrary

Lately, Brian and I have become fans, or at least casual admirers, of the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. (This is the series that HBO's "True Blood" is rather loosely based on. Think Twilight for grownups...with a sense of humor, which I've been given to understand is conspicuously absent from Stephanie Meyer's work.) We came across the first one on some freebie table somewhere, and then picked up the second from our local library...but at that point we got stuck, because while the library had several other volumes in the series, it didn't have the third one, and we like to read a series in order whenever possible. And while we enjoy these books, we don't really love them enough to shell out $10 per book for them.

Fortunately, we found a way around this problem. As it turns out, our local library participates in a program called eLibraryNJ, which is like interlibrary loan for e-books. It works like this:

1. You sign up for an account, using your library card number and a PIN you can get from the library reference desk.
2. You search the catalogue for the book you want and check it out. If someone else currently has it checked out, you can put a hold on it, and you'll be notified by e-mail when the book becomes available.
3. You can read the book online or download a copy onto your e-reader or other device. The books are available in various formats; we've been reading them with the Kindle app on our tablet, but we've also seen books in PDF form, a format called OverDrive that you can read in your browser, and an open-source format called ePub that works with most e-readers.
4. When you're done with the book, you can check it back in to make room for a new one. However, if you forget to do this, the book checks itself back in automatically when it expires at the end of three weeks. If you're not done with the book after three weeks, you can renew it, as long as no one else has it on hold.

This program is an elegant way to make e-books lendable without getting snarled up in copyright issues. With its help, we've been able to make our way through the first five Southern Vampire books, and we've just started on the sixth (though we had to wait a few weeks for that one). And since eLibraryNJ appears to have every book in the series in "stock," we should have no trouble making it all the way through.

And when that runs out, there are heaps of other series we can try, all just a click away. The site even offers suggestions for us based on our previous choices, just like Amazon does. Plus, it has a collection of classic works in the public domain that you can check out for as long as you like; they never expire, and they don't count toward your checkout limit. So if we ever want to read something by Wilkie Collins besides The Moonstone and The Woman in White, the only two novels available at our local library, we're in luck.

All in all, this site is a great resource for all book lovers who live in New Jersey and own any kind of electronic device. Most public libraries seem to belong to the site, and even a few non-public ones, like the Carl C. Brigham Library at Educational Testing Service. And if you don't happen to live in New Jersey, try Googling "e-library" plus the name of your state, and there's a good chance you'll find one you can use.

Money Crashers: Toy Lending Libraries & Exchanges

This particular post for Money Crashers deals with a topic that I don't personally have a lot of experience with: kids' toys. Of course, Brian and I do have some experience with toys, having a total of nine (count 'em, nine) nieces and nephews between us: we have given them quite a few toys over the years at Christmas/Hanukkah time, and we have also seen quite a lot of their toys whenever we go to visit. But that's not quite the same thing as living among them, surrounded on all sides, day in and day out—not to mention dealing with the kids' pleas for new ones. I can only guess at how frustrating this situation is for moms and dads, but based on the little taste I've had of it, I'd have to guess it gets old pretty quickly.

So for all you moms and dads out there, even if I can't personally empathize with your
3 situation, I can offer an idea that might help at least a bit: sharing toys. I don't mean just persuading your own kids to share with each other and with their friends, but paring down the size of your toy collection at home by drawing toys from a pool that's shared with a whole bunch of other kids.

One way to do this is a toy library, if your town happens to have one. It's just like a regular library, except you can borrow toys instead of books. Doing this lets your kids rotate their selection of toys at home, so they get to try new ones every few weeks without completely flooding the house with them—or sinking your wallet.

If you don't have a toy library available, another alternative—though it's a bit more work—is to organize a toy exchange. Basically, you just gather up all the toys your kids are tired of, get together with a bunch of other families who have done the same, and swap your old toys for theirs. Everyone gets to go home with toys that are new to them, and everything left over goes to a worthwhile charity.

If either of these sounds like it might make at least a small dent in your home's toy budget and toy clutter, check out the full article here: Toy Lending Libraries & Exchanges – Benefits and How They Work

Ecofrugal Living podcast #12: Stuff Green People Like

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for November 14, 2010.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Local Shopping Challenge, Day 7: Library loot

To wrap up my 7-day local shopping challenge, I turned to my favorite source of free entertainment: the local library. I'd had my eye for a little while on a book called The Economic Naturalist, which I came across in the library's online catalogue, that promises to explain such "everyday enigmas" as "Why do 24-hour convenience stores have locks on their doors?" and "Why are brown eggs more expensive than white ones, even though the two types taste the same and have identical nutritional value?" I'm a sucker for this sort of "how come" genre, and I've already devoured Freakonomics and several volumes from the Straight Dope and Imponderables series. Because this particular example focuses on economic questions, it may also turn out to provide some useful fodder for future blog entries. But even if all it provides is entertainment, it's still a great value at zero dollars.

All in all, I think this local "shopping" challenge has been a successful one. I've managed to bring home free or near-free stuff in several different categories, from food to reading material to household goods, and I've spent only 75 cents on the whole weeklong project, making it much more cost-effective than my first local shopping challenge. However, like the first one, it was more entertaining than useful. True, all the items I found had some value to me, and none of them cost more than a dollar, but most of them weren't things I actually needed. With the possible exception of the walnuts we found on Sunday, these weren't items I would actually have picked up if I'd had to pay more than a dollar for them.

So next time I set myself a local shopping challenge, I think I'll go about it differently. Instead of just setting a challenge and giving myself a certain amount of time to meet it, I'll wait until there's a specific item that I actually need, and then I'll try to find some way to acquire it locally for as little money as possible. Success will be gauged not just based on whether I found the item or not, but also on whether I was able to buy it without paying significantly more than I would have spent at a big-box store. After all, what really keeps most people from shopping locally is the limited selection and higher prices, so if I can figure out ways to get around both of these problems, that's probably what my ecofrugal readers would most like to know.

Conquering the gazingus pin

One of my favorite bloggers, Emily Guy Birkin, recently posted at Live Like a Mensch on the topic of "gazingus pins." This concept comes from the classic personal-finance work Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which has taken on the status of a near-sacred text among the frugal set. The authors use the term "gazingus pin" to refer to "any item that you just can't pass by without buying." This isn't the same thing as any item you buy regularly: shopping for groceries and gas on a weekly basis, for instance, doesn't make them gazingus pins. What sets the gazingus pin apart is that it's something you're always prepared to buy another of, even if you already have all you could possibly use and then some.

Everyone's gazingus pins are different. For example, some people—mostly people of the female variety—can't resist new shoes, no matter how many pairs they own already. Others keep acquiring shiny new kitchen gadgets or technological toys. Birkin confesses in her post that she personally has an incurable addiction to books, calendars, and office supplies. So when she concluded the post by asking her readers to share their "personal gazingus pins," I tried to come up with some equally amusing quirk that I could disclose...and came up blank. Not only couldn't I think of a single thing that falls into the category of "mindless spending" for either of us, I couldn't even really wrap my brain around the concept. We're both such compulsive analyzers that we can't make even the smallest of purchases without considering all the angles first; I don't think we could spend mindlessly if we tried.

It's true that we are currently rather oversupplied with books; thanks to several recent sales, we have two good-sized piles of them in our soon-to-be guest room that are either waiting to be read (the pile on the left) or waiting to be passed on to other readers, having failed to earn a place on our overcrowded bookshelves (on the right). But the only reason we've accumulated so many is that we've had an unusual run of luck at finding them secondhand or otherwise dirt-cheap. If we go to Barnes and Noble, by contrast, where even the paperbacks cost $9 and up, we almost invariably walk out empty-handed. We can enjoy a carefree hour of browsing, but when it comes to actually carrying something to the checkout, we can never quite convince ourselves that it's worth the money. Even if we happen to see something we like, we generally prefer to hold off on buying it at least until we can look for it at the library instead.

The thing is, we weren't always like this. When I brought up the topic with Brian, he came up with three gazingus pins he used to have: books, comic books, and CDs. He used to binge on these regularly, buying ten or twelve at a pop. These days, he still buys all of these things occasionally, but only in a measured, thoughtful way. He will actually think about how much he wants a particular book or CD and, more often than not, will leave it on the rack. He's not sure quite how he made the shift from buying compulsively to analyzing obsessively, but at some point it just became a habit. These days, he more often needs to be talked into buying something when it's clearly worth the money than to be talked out of it when it isn't.

One thing that many people say they find helpful for dealing with their gazingus pins is to set ground rules. Birkin, for instance, says she now has a "one in, two out" rule with books: every time she acquires a new one, she has to purge two from her shelves. (This doesn't necessarily limit her spending, but at least it keeps the size of her collection in check.) In similar fashion, I have tamed my coffeehouse habit (not exactly a traditional gazingus pin because it's not something you amass a huge collection of, but it does run into money) by training myself to buy coffee only with the money I earn from survey rewards. Since I only accumulate survey rewards at a limited rate, I now enjoy these treats only once a month or so—which is good news for my waistline as well as my wallet.

Many people on the Dollar Stretcher forums have mentioned a different rule: when they get the urge to buy something, they must put it in their online shopping cart and then leave it there for at least 24 hours. By the time they come back to it, they say, they often find they can abandon it without regret. I've never tried this exact strategy myself (I'm always afraid I'll somehow hit the "check out" button by accident and find I've already paid for something without having a chance to reconsider), but I have a similar trick: when I see something I like, I add it to my wish list on Amazon.com. I find this sort of equivalent to "bookmarking" the item so I can find it again if I decide to buy it. Sometimes I end up buying it, sometimes I manage to find it for free (e.g., at the library) instead, and sometimes I conclude I don't really need it after all—but just the act of putting it on the list is enough to satisfy that urge to "get this, now." The simple act of bookmarking removes all sense of urgency; I know that if and when I decide it's worth the money, the item will still be right there waiting for me. And of course, as a side benefit, if anyone asks me what I want for my birthday, I can just direct them to the list. (You might wonder whether it's really reasonable to send my family and friends to Amazon to buy for me when I refuse to shop there myself on account of their evil labor practices, but I've actually found a way around this. Amazon now allows you to add items from other sites to your Wish List as well—so I went through my list and replaced all the items I'd found on Amazon with identical items from other sites. Now I have all my potential purchases stored in one convenient place, and I'm not actually directing any revenue to the mythical monster.)

So on the whole, it seems that, with a little retraining, it is possible to break (or at least control) a gazingus-pin habit. Some people, like Brian, can just gradually modify their spending habits over time; others need to trick themselves into behaving differently. Just as everyone's gazingus pins are different, the strategies that work for breaking free of them are likely to be different as well—but with a little trial and error, I'm convinced, anyone can hit on the right one sooner or later. Shoppers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your massive collection of gazingus pins!

Entertainment by the hour

It's often said that the best gift is something the recipients will enjoy, but would never buy for themselves. One of our Hanukkah presents this year definitely fell into this category: a pair of theater tickets. Brian and I do go to a show once in a while, but it's usually a summertime production at one of the local open-air theaters, which cost anywhere from $5 to $15 per seat (and depending on the theater, you may have to provide the seat yourself). I think the last time I actually went all the way into the city to see a show was before Brian and I were married. But my sister got word of this production called Potted Potter, in which two guys condense all seven books of the Harry Potter series into about an hour and a half, and she decided we really had to see it.

So last weekend, for the first time in our married life, we actually drove down to Philadelphia and had dinner and a show. And it was indeed quite enjoyable, partly because of the novelty itself; I think I enjoyed seeing the theater all decked out in Hogwarts fashion nearly as much as I enjoyed the actual play. But as we drove home, Brian and I had to admit that, much as we enjoyed it, an outing like this probably wasn't something we'd ever choose to do on our own. This was partly because of the travel time involved, but mostly because of the expense. Unfortunately for my sister, the price of her gift was printed right on the tickets—$69 apiece—and a little quick calculation revealed that, for a 70-minute show, this worked out to nearly two dollars per minute. True, we also got some entertainment value out of the time we spent dining and hanging out before the show started, so you could say it was really more like two hours of entertainment—but then you also have to factor in the tax and the additional money spent on gas, parking, and refreshments to figure out the total cost of that two hours. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, a similar evening would cost about $180 for two hours of dinner-and-a-show, or $90 per hour.

This got me thinking about some of the other things Brian and I do for entertainment, and how much they cost on an hourly basis. Our most common evening out is a concert at the Minstrel up in north Jersey, which has an unusual payment structure: it's only $8 to get in, but in order to get out again, you get subjected to a guilt trip about how little you paid and how much this kind of music is really worth, then requested to put the balance of what you should have paid into a fishing creel that hangs conspicuously near the entrance. (The point of this system is to encourage people to come out for acts that aren't familiar to them, knowing that they're only putting 8 bucks on the line to find out whether they like it or not.) Brian and I, however, usually avoid the $8 admission fee by coming as volunteers. The entire show is volunteer-run, so as an incentive, all volunteers get free admission on the night they volunteer plus a "tick" that allows them to get in free to a future show of their choice. So what Brian and I generally do is to sign me up as a baker (spending about $2 on the ingredients for a home-baked goodie) and then use up one of my existing "ticks" for his admission. Our average contribution to the creel is $10, so altogether, we pay about $12 for three hours of music and schmoozing with friends. (Technically, it also costs about $8 for the gas to get to and from the show, but since we often carpool with a friend, our actual transportation cost varies, and it's easier to do the calculation without it.)

So, if the Minstrel is a basic evening of entertainment for the two of us, that means our baseline price for entertainment—the amount that we consider neither terribly exorbitant nor a great bargain—is about $4 an hour. So by using this as a baseline, I should be able to figure out how other forms of entertainment stack up for us in terms of value. However, when I start crunching numbers, I find that nearly every form of entertainment, from movies to board games, can vary hugely in dollar cost per hour. For example:

• Movies. The last movie we saw in the theater was Wall-E. After wincing our way through the previews and ads before the show, we decided that from then on, we'd be happier waiting for the DVDs. So now, instead of paying $9 a ticket for a two-hour movie ($9 per hour for the two of us), we can spend $1 on a Redbox rental and pay only 50 cents per hour. Or, if we're willing to wait a little longer, most of the movies we really care seeing about will probably show up at the library for free.
• TV series. As I've noted before, even before we had cable, we could watch most of our favorite shows for free on Hulu or on the individual networks' websites. Last year, we decided to spring for $79-a-year Amazon Prime subscription, which gives us access to an even broader range of choices. We've already watched over 50 episodes of MythBusters, plus a few miscellaneous movies and things, so the average cost per hour of the entertainment we've enjoyed through Amazon Prime works out to around $1.50 so far and will continue to drop as the year goes on. However, there are still some favorites of ours that are neither available for free nor included with Prime. For instance, "A Game of Thrones" is available to us only on DVD, at $40 per season. That gets us ten one-hour episodes plus a few hours' worth of bonus features, so it comes to about $3 per hour. We've also been working our way through the entire run of "Castle." This is a network show (ABC), so it would actually be free for us to watch new episodes, but previous seasons cost money; after borrowing Season 1 from a friend, we had to shell out $20 each for streaming versions of subsequent seasons, which works out to 83 cents for each one-hour episode. However, if we're willing to wait for the current season until all the episodes are available on Hulu Plus, we can just shell out 8 bucks for a one-month subscription and watch the whole season in that one month, spending only 33 cents per hour. (In theory, we could just sign up for the one-week free trial and binge on all 24 episodes in one week for nothing, but that's probably more vegging out than even we can handle.)
• Books. When I read on my own, I can power through a standard fantasy or mystery novel in a day—say, six hours of solid reading. But when I read aloud to Brian, it takes much longer, and we get to enjoy the book together, so it stretches out to maybe 20 hours of entertainment for the two of us. So a $20 hardcover costs $1 per hour, a $9 paperback costs 45 cents per hour, a $4 secondhand paperback costs 20 cents per hour, and a library book (or one borrowed from a friend or relative) costs an unbeatable zero bucks per hour. (This is the main reason we'll probably never buy a Kindle: a secondhand paperback is still a lot cheaper than a Kindle download.)
• Video games. Brian gave up his $15-a-month subscription to World of Warcraft years ago—not because it wasn't a good value, but because he was spending so many hours on it that it actually was a good value, and he decided he needed to reclaim those hours. I, however, often have down time between work assignments that I can devote to games, and one of my favorite genres is the point-and-click adventure. The one I've currently got my eye on is "The Book of Unwritten Tales," a highly-rated sendup of the fantasy adventure genre that promises 20 hours of gameplay for $10, or. At 50 cents per hour, that looks like a pretty good value—but the reason I haven't sprung for it yet is that I keep reminding myself that there are loads of interactive fiction games, which I enjoy almost as much, available for free at the Interactive Fiction Database. Some of these provide only about half an hour of play time while others can keep me busy for days if not weeks, but at zero dollars, they're all as good value as it's possible to get.
• Board games. Brian and I love board games, but we seldom get a chance to play them, because most of our favorites don't work for only two players. This makes spending money on a board game a chancy proposition. Popular games on Amazon.com cost anywhere from $20 to $60, and it's hard to justify spending that much on a game if we're not sure how often we'll actually get to enjoy it. However, if we find a decent game at a yard sale, it's almost always worth snatching up, since it can potentially provide countless hours of entertainment for as little as a dollar. 
• Puzzles. Crossword puzzles are another of my favorite time-wasters when I'm between work assignments. My favorite type is cryptic crosswords, which are hard to find online (British newspapers like The Times and The Guardian have them, but I can never get through them, possibly because they contain too many UK-only references for me). So this Christmas, Brian got me a collection of them (one of the few that I haven't already worked my way through) for $11.70. The puzzles turn out to be pretty easy, taking me about 10 minutes apiece, so the 50 puzzles in the book will probably provide me with about 500 minutes of entertainment for about $1.40 per hour. The other crossword book he got me, however, is a much better value: just $6.13, including shipping, for 70 crosswords that take me about half an hour apiece. That comes to 35 hours of diversion at a mere 17.5 cents per hour. (I can also download the weekly Saturday puzzle from the Wall Street Journal for free, but that's only good for one day out of seven; the puzzles available during the rest of the week aren't nearly as interesting.)

So, looking at all these options, it's clear that there's a huge variety of choices out there, with a tremendously wide range of hourly cost. The freebies are obviously the best value of all, but even among the paid products, there are lots of options that cost no more than a dollar per hour—less than a quarter of the price of an outing to the Minstrel. Of course, that's not to say that the Minstrel isn't worth the money; for a really good evening of music, $4 an hour is still an excellent value. We'll even pay well above that rate for an act we really want to see; we considered $25 a ticket for a concert with David Wilcox and Susan Werner on the same stage, for instance, to be money well spent. But if the act on any given Friday is only so-so, we might just get better value for our money by staying home with a $1 episode of "Castle"—or a good book.

Thrift Week Day Seven: Use Community Resources Day

Well, it looks like Thrift Week is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. I was going to call this final day Visit Your Library Day, but I decided to expand it to Use Community Resources Day to cover more of the bases. Unfortunately, that didn't actually increase my options all that much. Since it was a rainy day in January, visiting the park wasn't particularly appealing, and local festivals usually take place on weekends (or occasionally on Thursday nights, when we can't usually make it). I did stop by the library, but there wasn't anything going on there except story hour for the kiddies. Since we're still in the middle of our Netflix trial, I didn't want to pick up a movie, and I'd already checked out the one book I particularly wanted to read last Friday. (I would have waited until today to get it, just to make Use Community Resources Day more useful, but it had just been checked in and I wanted to snatch it up before someone else got it.) So I just hung out for a little while, paging through magazines, so I could at least say I'd done something. Not very impressive, I must admit.

Sadly, the follow-up to my Shop Secondhand Day purchase isn't very inspiring either. I took the jacket to the local tailor shop this afternoon to get the sleeves shortened. At first she said she could do it, but once she turned up the sleeves and took a look at the lining, she claimed that in order to do the sleeves, she'd have to replace the lining as well—for $85—and she didn't think it was worth it. (This is the same tailor who told me last fall that it would be impossible to reset the sleeves in my lightweight coat. Honestly, you'd think this woman was going out of her way to avoid paying jobs.) So I'm going to have to see if I can manage to piece the lining together myself somehow, using my extremely rudimentary sewing skills. And after that, I'll see if I can find someone who's willing to shorten the sleeves for me—I suspect that job is beyond my abilities. Sigh. This $2 secondhand jacket is turning out to be a costly purchase. And I'm growing disenchanted with my local businesses....

Green Ideas

As usual, Earth Day this year feels like a bit of a letdown. Every twenty-second of April, I feel like I should make some kind of bold, dramatic gesture: planting a tree, swearing off bottled water, or maybe even starting a recycling program in my community. But our yard already has all the trees it can comfortably hold, our town already has an excellent curbside recycling program, and we never buy bottled water as it is. So as usual, I'm forced to settle for a bunch of tiny little gestures—most of them things that I do on a regular basis already.

However, it occurred to me that some of the green steps that are routine for me might actually be less so for some of you, and vice versa. So instead of posting about a big new thing that I'm going to do this Earth Day, I'm going to post a list of ten things that I've already tried, and that you might like to try too. And if you folks respond in kind in the comments section, maybe I can actually get some new ecofrugal ideas that I haven't already tried. So here is my list of Things to Try for Earth Day:

1. Check your carbon footprint. There are tons of carbon footprint calculators on the Web, each of which seems to use a different algorithm for calculating your individual or household CO2 emissions; when I tried calculating our household emissions a couple of years back, I got results ranging from 5.2 tons a year to 31 tons. However, while the sites all differed as to the actual number, they were pretty much in agreement that it was on the low side for an American household. So even if the number you get is only an approximation, it can at least give you a good idea where you fall on the curve. And some sites, such as Carbonfund, give you the option of immediately purchasing carbon offsets to match the exact amount of emissions you produce. Or, for a more complete picture of your environmental impact, you can check out a site like MyFootprint or Global Footprint Network.

2. Visit your local library. We go to ours all the time, although these days we seem to check out more movies than books. But that's okay; either way, borrowing them is much more earth-friendly than buying them. We also take advantage of the events our local library hosts, such as film screenings, poetry readings and the annual used book sale. A trip to the library is a great green alternative to a trip to the mall (and for many of us, it needn't even involve getting in the car).

3. Prepare a meal with seasonal ingredients. Around here (USDA Zone 6), seasonal produce at this time of year includes the earliest asparagus, spinach, and rhubarb. Those of you in warmer climates may have more to choose from. Bonus points if your ingredients are actually locally grown; double points if they're organic.

4. Better yet, try growing your own. Currently poking their heads above the ground in my garden are broccoli and cabbage seedlings, snow peas, and some wee tiny little sprouts of arugula. It'll be a couple of months before any of that is ready to eat, but it makes me feel nice and self-sufficient knowing it's there. If you haven't got a yard, consider starting a container garden with a couple of tomato or pepper plants on a porch or balcony. Even a sunny window is sufficient for a pot or two of fresh herbs.

5. Go thrift shopping. This is actually a frustrating experience for me most of the time, because there are only two thrift shops here in town. One is a very smart, upscale consignment shop with a selection of very fashionable clothes from well-known designers, but the prices are higher than at low-end retail stores like Sears or Target, and there's practically nothing available above a size eight; the other is a dark, cluttered basement that's only open two days a week and has a fairly frumpy selection of goods that seldom changes (although on the rare occasions when gems do show up there, the prices are great). So if I want to have a real thrift-shopping extravaganza, I have to make a special trip to the nearest Goodwill store, which has a good-sized selection and fairly decent prices, but is twenty minutes away in an area we seldom visit for any other reason. So this tip may actually work out better for you than it usually does for me.

I was planning to try going for ten Earth Day ideas, but those five are the only ones that came to me right off the top of my head. Perhaps I'll post more tomorrow if any come to mind. In the meantime, please comment and tell me all about your favorite green activities. What am I missing out on?

Stuff Green People Like

Yesterday, my uncle Jay forwarded me this link to the blog "Stuff White People Like." It's a reference to the late, lamented TV show "My So-Called Life," which played out its first and only season during my senior year of college. I was indeed a huge fan of the show, but I was actually kind of ticked off by the implication that this is a characteristic I share with all "white people." After all, if all white people liked the show that much, then how come it got canceled after one season? Back at the time, liking that show was something that actually set us fans apart from mainstream America. So how does this guy Christian Lander reckon that being a fan of it now is simply a part of mainstream, white-American culture?

Perusing the blog in more detail, I found that what annoyed me about this one entry was really typical of the blog as a whole. It's obvious from the title of the blog that it's going to be nothing but blatant stereotypes, but that would be pardonable if the stereotypes were incisive and funny. The problem is, Lander is actually promulgating a stereotype of a very specific subculture of white America (and Canada)—the upper-middle-class, northeastern liberal elite so despised by the Tea Party—as belonging to "white people" in general. It's not just an invidious stereotype; it's an invidious, inaccurate stereotype. Sarah Palin probably hates everything on Lander's full list of Stuff White People Like, from organic food to Bob Marley.

Aside from the fact that this just promotes the idea that racial profiling is okay, as long as it's aimed at a privileged group (they're stereotypes of white people! Get it?), I couldn't help being annoyed at the wooliness of the stereotype itself. I pretty clearly belong to the group Lander is trying to satirize, and many of the things on his list (farmer's markets, David Sedaris, recycling) are things I like a lot. Yet there were also quite a few things on the list (having two last names, modern furniture, being offended) that I positively dislike, or at a minimum, have no interest in. And as I ticked my way down the list, I kept finding items that are antithetical to my ecofrugal lifestyle: you'll never catch me going to a place that charges $9 for a sandwich, especially when most of the items on the menu aren't vegetarian, nor am I about to pay $10 for a Moleskine notebook that isn't even made with recycled paper.

So I've decided to start my own list. It's called "Stuff Ecofrugal People Like," and it's for people who are really part of my tribe—regardless of skin color.

1. Public libraries. More books than one person could ever read, plus music recordings, movies, Internet access, and even community gatherings like film screenings, poetry readings, and classes for kids. All for free! (Well, not exactly free, since it's paid for by your tax dollars. But if you have to pay them anyway, you might as well get your money's worth, right?)

2. Creative reuse. Take an object that's no longer useful for its original purpose, and turn it into something else—the more unexpected, the better. Plant flowers in an old boot. Turn an obsolete Macintosh computer into a fish tank. Make coasters out of unwanted CD-ROMs. Make your own notebooks out of scrap paper (much more frugal than Moleskine). This is an ecofrugal three-fer: it keeps waste out of landfills, saves the money and resources that would otherwise be used on new stuff, and gives you the creative kick of seeing an old object in a new way.

3. Freecycle. Also a three-fer, this allows you to prevent waste, get rid of stuff you don't want, and get useful stuff for free. It's even better than thrift shops and yard sales, which ecofrugal people also love.

4. The Habitat ReStore, where you can get all manner of useful stuff for your home (from a single nail to a complete set of kitchen cabinets), save resources, and support a good cause all at the same time.

5. Wasted Spaces, a home-improvement show hosted by a sexy Australian who actually makes an existing space work better instead of tearing everything out and replacing it. A typical budget for this show is around $500 rather than $5,000 or $15,000 or $25,000, and it's great fun to see all the creative ways Karl finds to make use of space that the homeowner probably never realized was there. (Did I mention he's a sexy Australian?)

6. Trader Joe's, which sells green goodies like organic raisins, Fair-Trade coffee, and free-range chicken for lower prices than anyplace else, along with a tempting array of tasty prepared treats like maple sandwich cookies, crumpets, and fizzy limeade. (To keep the frugal in ecofrugal, we limit ourselves to one non-list purchase per visit.)

7. Biking to work. Hybrid cars are nice, but they ain't cheap. A bike, by contrast, costs little to buy and maintain, uses no gas at all, and gives you some exercise into the bargain. Plus it enables you to skirt right around traffic jams and feel smug.

That's all I have so far. If there's anything else you think really needs to be on the list, post a comment and let me know.

Long live the book

I've been having an e-mail conversation with a colleague about what one of my clients referred to as "changes" in the publishing field. My colleague commented wryly that "going through some changes" was about the mildest way she'd ever heard it put; the way one of the higher-ups at her company phrased it was, "The book is dead." I disputed this idea, pointing out that people often predict the death of an old technology when a new one shows up on the scene (e.g., TV versus radio), but it doesn't always work out that way. However, my curiosity was piqued, so I typed the phrase "the book is dead" into Google to see what the voices of the Internet had to say on this subject.

Somewhere on the first page of hits, I turned up an article called, "The book is dead. Long live the book." It's an examination of the limitations of the book form, and quite interesting in its own right, but what really caught my interest were the comments. It's long been my observation that even on sites where the content itself is thoughtful, well written, and properly punctuated (e.g., the blogs associated with the New York Times), many, if not most, of the comments tend to be sloppily written. So I was truly impressed to find that the readers of this site, almost without exception, had actually organized their thoughts and written out focused, coherent arguments—in complete sentences, no less. One comment that particularly struck me came from a reader with the handle "Suebob":

I can buy a used book at a garage sale for 25 cents. I can throw it in my purse. I can spill coffee on it. I can take it into the bathtub, read it in bed, take it camping, on an airplane. I can pass it on to friends easily. I can bookmark pages and go back to them in one second. I can scribble notes on the pages. Highlight.

The book may take me 10 hours to read. Where else can I get so much value for 2.5 cents an hour?

This got me thinking: in ecofrugal terms, how does the book compare to electronic texts?

As Suebob notes, a secondhand book can give a lot of value in terms of hours of entertainment per dollar spent. But then again, if you're already paying a fixed monthly fee for Internet access, everything you read online is essentially free—or at least already paid for. On the other hand, you do need a source of electricity to read anything in an electronic form. But how does the environmental cost of that electricity compare to the cost of the trees harvested, mulched, and milled to produce the paper for a printed book? (Cartoonist Signe Wilkinson raised this same issue in a cartoon about the iPad.) I don't think I have enough information to answer that question; there are just too many variables. For example, is the book being read at night by electric light? If so, are the bulbs CFLs or incandescents? What if the publisher used recycled paper? What about the power used to produce that paper? What about the gas used by the trucks that delivered the books to the bookstore? There's no way to account for everything.

Pretty much the only factor in the ecofrugal equation that we can nail down is the cost of the text itself. And even that can be tricky. For example, if you buy yourself a Kindle, how do you factor that expense into the cost of the books you read on it? Do you work out how much you spent over the course of a year on the Kindle and e-books for it, and then compare that with the cost of buying the same books at a store? But would you have bought them in hardcover or paperback? What if you'd taken some of them out of the library instead?

For me, the bottom line is that the bottom line is too hard to calculate. So when it comes to reading, I tend to make my decisions based on more emotional factors. And for visceral pleasure, the book-as-book tends to win for me, hands down. As Suebob says, the physical advantages of a book—carrying it anywhere, reading it in bed, marking the pages—are unmatched by any electronic format out there (at least at present). Case in point: back when Brian and I were on our Jeeves-and-Wooster kick a year or so ago, I took the first few volumes out of the library and read them aloud to him. When we'd exhausted the library's supply, I turned to Project Gutenberg and found several more titles online, so I tried reading them aloud in the same way. We got through them, but it was awkward. If I wanted to read to him while he was doing something else, such as cooking, I had to haul his laptop into the kitchen, pull up the book on the screen, and scroll through the document as I read, trying not to lose my place when I paged down and taking care all the time to avoid spilling anything on the keyboard. It just wasn't the same.

And as Buzzmachine reader Steve Thomas pointed out, print has its advantages for less enjoyable books as well:

I will add, in the defence of books, that there’s one advantage over ebooks — when they turn out to be crap, you can throw them at the wall. Very satisfying.

You can even do worse to them than that, as a recent XKCD cartoon points out.

Third Place? I Don't Know

On my recent trip to Pittsburgh, I read an article in Acela, the Amtrak on-board magazine, called "The Race for Third Place." (It appears to have been picked up from the airline magazine Arrive, because I found a copy of it here.) It was about how the recession is posing a special challenge for businesses that have been trying to market themselves as "third places"--that is, places where people spend significant amounts of time other than home and work. A "third place" could be a bar, a library, a coffee shop, a health club, a church, or a shopping mall--anyplace where people go just to "hang out," rather than going in, conducting their business, and leaving.

The existence of places like this is one of the things that holds communities together. That's why I like living in a town that has both bars and churches, even though I never spend any time at either type of place. It's why I mourned the passing of the local sweetshop, with its bona fide old-fashioned soda fountain, even though I only actually went there a few times a year. And it's why I was disappointed when the "comic cafe" across the river, once a great hangout where you could enjoy an ice cream or browse through comics or both (just so long as you didn't actually handle food and comics at the same time), moved to a new venue, where the comic shop was upstairs and the cafe downstairs, with no seating at all in the comic area (presumably because they didn't want to encourage folks to sit down and look at the merchandise) and so little in the cafe that you would feel guilty about lingering for even a minute after finishing your food. (I lost all interest in going there after that, and the Troll switched to buying his comics from another store, one that sold games as well as comics and actually encouraged hanging out.)

But it occurred to me as I read the article that, although I recognize the importance of places like these, I don't really have a "third place" myself. Sure, I like to go to a coffeehouse once in a while, but I'm not a regular at any particular coffeehouse. I take ample advantage of our local library, but I don't really hang out there--I mostly just go in, browse through the books and videos, choose one or don't choose one, and leave. I don't sit down with the book I've found and read it right there. In fact, because I work at home, I really don't even have a second place, let alone a third one.

So why, if I understand the value of having a place to hang out, don't I have one? I think it's because for me a "third place" would have to be someplace I could spend significant amounts of time without spending significant amounts of money. That lets out the coffeehouses, because $3 or $4 a drink starts running into money when you make a daily habit of it. And it lets out the library, because you can't eat or drink at all in there, and I like to have something to sip while I read. So the closest thing I have to a "third place" is the local park, where I like to go for walks in the summer, and where I can sometimes perch on a park bench and work on a crossword and drink my own coffee that I made at home, without having to pay $4 for it. But the thing is, when I go and hang out at the park, I'm hanging out by myself. I might see a few joggers passing through, or a mom with her kids, but I don't usually interact with anybody. It isn't really a place where I could go to meet people, or even just to be around people.

I wonder why in a town like mine, which does such a good job in so many ways of maintaining strong community ties, there are no real public spaces for people to connect with their neighbors?