Stop the book-buying insanity!

I confess that I am a compulsive book hoarder. I suppose there are worse afflictions in life, but I'm really running out of shelf space. This article about ways to stop accumulating books has some very good advice on how to quit the habit.

One of their suggestions is to borrow books from the library instead of buying them. I do that, but all that does is delay me from working my way through the books I already own. One of the problems with the libraries is that it's not always easy to find out online if the book is held by any library. Just about all of your search results are going to be from places which offer to sell you the book. Library listings are virtually impossible to find online unless you know the website of your library's online catalogue which, thankfully, is just about all of them these days.

It may become easier soon. Efforts are underway to help make connect those catalogues to each other and to make them easier to search. Worldcat is one such site. It lets you find items listed in more than 10,000 libraries around the world.

If you don't have a library near you, then you can visit one online by heading over to the Open Library. It is a project that aims to have a web page for every book, sort of like a literary Wikipedia. You will either be able to read details about books, read the books themselves online or even download them for reading later.

Of course, the vast majority of books available there are books where the copyright has lapsed which means books that were mostly published before the 1920s. The problem is that copyright laws pretty much preclude anything more recent from appearing online for free. Will Google be the ones to change that?