I like books

Always have. I started collecting books when I was around 9 or 10 years old. My family moved to France in 1954 when I was that age, and we lived in a small village with of 200 people, about 10 of whom spoke English. I had plenty of spare time on my hands and spent a lot of it reading, as there was little radio to listen to, no television, and of course no video games. The library at the Air Force base was a life-saver, as was the Science Fiction Book club.

Back in the US, I got into the habit of stopping at every book store that came along to browse for things on my wish list. Things got added to it a lot faster than they were removed.

Then the internet arrived. At some point, I discovered a web site called the Advanced Book Exchange. It was a database that collected inventory info every night from hundreds of independent bookstores and allowed you to search for books and order them from the stores. You could even keep a wish list of books and it would send you an email if one of the stores got a book on your list. Amazing! I pretty much cleared out my list of things I'd been looking for in about two years. Some of the things had been on the list for 30 years or more.

See? The internet is useful.