Buying books in the Philippines

I guess I should explain about books here in the rural Philippines.

In the past, I used to go nuts: no books, only a daily newspaper. But when I moved here, we had dial up internet, which helped. Since from visits I knew there were no nearby bookstores, I brought about 200 books with me to keep myself busy.

About two years ago, a mall opened the other end of town...it has a bookstore that stocks best sellers and a lot of reference/school books and religious stuff (mostly protestant self esteem type books). There are also used books there: overstocks and paperback used books, mainly best sellers .

Last year, the US Postal service discontinued the "MBAG" surface rate for printed matter, so I rarely get books from the US: Too expensive.

So now, I mainly find books on line and webpages to read.

So I get a lot of books from project Gutenburg or Librivox. I also am downloading a lot of podcasts, including a bunch of history courses from Berkeley.

Amazon should be a good resource for ebooks, but the problem is trying to redownload and reopen the books when your hard drive crashes. Also, the e books cost just as much as print books (more, since usually I bought used books from Amazon) but I don't enjoy reading on the computer as much as I do with a print book.

We just opened a new library in town, and one of these days I'll visit there...but so far, between my classics and the internet, I am able to find most of the stuff I need or want.