That’s why I haven’t purchased any Discworld books recently… I’m not 100% sure which ones I’ve read and which ones I haven’t. One of these days I’m gonna pile them all together out of my shelves and write down all the titles I have already and keep the list in my wallet.
<SLAPS Booker57 with a Wet Trout>
Thou shalt not cliche’. :rolleyes:
Sell it on Amazon.
I really hate it when it’s the same book with a new title and a new cover and a new story by a new author. What a ripoff.
However, sometimes I do this on purpose. Let me explain: I sometimes buy a book I have already read (and own), if it is a translation in another language, so that I can practice it.
For instance, I have several copies of the same discworld book, in (respectively) English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and German. It helps a lot when you can read a book in another language and you already know the plot and general structure of the work.
Does anybody else here do the same?
Just my 2 eurocent!
JoseB
I have done this by accident (especially when I see an out-of-print title in a series I like and think: have I got that one?!).
But I also have been ‘tricked’ by publishers (or the US edition ) renaming a book.
I do that with Asterix books. Very informative.
When this happens, I see it as an opportunity to practice “book evangelism”. I give it away in hopes of snagging a new reader.
Or very young. When I was in high school I knew every magazine I owned, and when I went to my favorite used store I very rarely if ever picked up a duplicate. Now, not so much.
I use a database to keep track of what books I own. I currently have 2700+ fiction books, and 1200+ non-fiction/technical/reference (I picked my username for good reason), and have found that this is the only way I can keep track of what I already have v.s. what I have read but don’t actually own yet and avoid wasting my book budget on duplicates (it is, in fact, one of the reasons I got my first computer, lo these many years ago).
There’s an SDMB group on the goodreads.com website, which you might like. It’s a fun place to catalog your books.
I’ve finished entering my 2500 sf books into a database, and am now working on my at least as many sf magazines. The real value will be to generate lists sorted in different ways. I have the Day and MITSFS magazine checklists (2 copies of each, one to use and one to save untouched) and my own magazine lists. I collect DAW books, and have a sheet with all the numbers, so I can check them off. But though I have lists of pbs by publisher, they’re not in a format I can bring to bookstores, so I’m going to write some Perl scripts to extract the data I want. (My stuff is in a very simple db, which I can export to a spreadsheet. The db is mostly useful for having a nice form for data entry.)
We’re all amateurs at this. Asimov once managed to write the same story twice, without realizing that he’d already written it. Unfortunately, I can’t recall either title off the top of my head, but the basic premise was that the dinosaurs were just as intelligent as us, and actually hunted each other into extinction, and now we’re doing the same thing.