Should You Buy a Book or Borrow It? I Earn 10% on Buy.

October 10, 2026

Let’s get the awkward part out of the way.

When you click a book link on this site and buy the thing, I get ten percent. That’s Bookshop.org’s affiliate rate — it’s on their own sign-up page, they call it industry-leading, and my affiliate number is 127595. Every book link here carries it.

So I’m the last guy you should ask whether to buy a book.

Which is exactly why I wanted to write this one down. A recommendation is only worth something if the person making it is willing to lose the sale. Here’s where I’d tell you to put the card away.

The rule, in one sentence

Borrow anything you’re auditioning. Buy what you’ll open twice.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Everything below is just me showing my work.

It’s a cut list, really. On a job you don’t order lumber for the house you might build — you order for the one on the drawings. Same here. Most of what lands on your to-read pile is a maybe, and maybes are what libraries are for.

Borrow it

Anything by an author you haven’t read. You are not buying a book, you’re running an audition, and the failure rate is high. I bail on a fair number of books I was sure about. I’ve got a whole system for quitting them, which should tell you how often it comes up.

Anything over about 600 pages. Big books are expensive, they’re the ones most likely to defeat you, and the ones you finish mostly don’t get reread — you remember them, which isn’t the same as revisiting them. Audition the brick. Buy it later if it earns a spot.

Book one of a series you haven’t committed to. This is the big one for me, because I read a lot of litRPG and progression fantasy, and those series run long. Twelve books. Twenty. If you buy book one of a twenty-book series on a whim, you have not bought a book, you’ve opened an account.

Anything you’re reading because somebody told you to. Book club, your brother-in-law, a list. Obligation reading has the worst conversion rate of anything in this house.

Buy it

Books you’ll reread. Some books you go back to, and you know which ones you are after a couple of years of paying attention. For me that’s a short, weird list and almost none of it is new.

Books you lend. I hand out paperbacks constantly, mostly to guys on site who’ve decided reading isn’t for them and are wrong about that. A lent book that doesn’t come back did its job. You can’t lend a hold.

Books you want where a kid will trip over them. Cole’s nine and Luke’s seven, and the single best thing I’ve done for their reading is leave the right books at kid height where I’d otherwise leave my keys. A library book goes back in three weeks. A book on the shelf is still there in June when one of them is bored enough to pick it up. That’s the one category where I’d tell you to buy a book you’ve already read and don’t personally need.

Books you write in. If you’re the sort who underlines, you need to own it. Pretty obvious, but I’ve watched people apologize for this like it’s vandalism. It’s your book.

Where the library actually loses

Now the part most people skip, because the library is a sacred cow and saying anything against it feels rude. It’s not rude, it’s just accurate for certain reading patterns.

Hold queues, if you read in bursts. I’m with Regina Public Library, and the digital side runs on Libby. The terms are generous — you can have ten titles out at once for up to twenty-one days, and place up to twenty-five holds. That’s a lot of free reading. But a hold lands when a hold lands. You get seventy-two hours to grab it, and the copy you’ve been waiting two months for will show up the exact week you’ve got a deadline and a kid’s hockey tournament. If your reading happens in concentrated stretches, the queue is working against your calendar.

Series bingeing. This is where it really falls apart. You finish book three at eleven at night and want book four right then. The library has four, but it’s out, and the hold is five weeks. Five weeks is enough time to lose the thread completely, and a series you’ve lost the thread on is a series you don’t go back to. Momentum is most of what makes a long series work. Holds break momentum by design.

And this one isn’t the library’s fault. Libraries don’t own their ebooks — they license them. The American Library Association has been loud about this for years: libraries lease digital titles under publisher terms, those licenses are often expensive, and some books aren’t offered to libraries at any price. That’s why your branch can’t just add five more copies when fifty people queue up for the same thriller. They’re not being cheap. They’re renting.

So when the wait is absurd and the book is the one you actually want right now, buying it isn’t a betrayal of the library. It’s a different tool for a different job.

What’s actually in my house

Fair’s fair. If I’m going to hand you a rule I should show you my own shelf.

I buy maybe eight or ten books a year. Most of my reading isn’t that — it’s library, mostly on the Kindle, and a decent pile of secondhand paperbacks from a shop downtown that I treat as a separate and much cheaper vice. Of the ones I buy new, over half are series I’ve already committed to, and a few are for the boys.

My shelf isn’t a trophy case. Dee would tell you it’s two shelves and a stack on the nightstand that has become structural. It’s mostly books I’d lend or reread, which is the rule doing its job, plus a few I bought in an airport and have no defence for.

Using both without turning it into a chore

The thing that stops people doing this well is admin. Nobody wants a spreadsheet for their hobby.

Here’s the low-effort version. Put holds on the maybes and forget about them — that’s the whole point of a queue, it works while you don’t think about it. When one lands and you’re not ready, Libby lets you pass it along and keep your spot. Then keep one or two bought books on the go underneath, so when the holds dry up or arrive at a stupid time, you’re not stuck without something to read.

That’s it. Holds for the audition pile, money for the sure things and the ones with a job to do in your house.

I’d rather you read more books than buy more books. If the honest answer on a given title is “your library has this, get it there,” I’ll say so — I did it in the Connelly piece, where the one you most want to read second is sitting there in hardcover at hardcover money. Still true. Go get it on a card.

The buy buttons will keep working for the ones worth owning.