Best Go Green Method to Save Money: eBooks

The following is a guest post by Andrea from Nickel By Nickel. This article is part of the Yakezie blog swap #10 and the topic for this blog swap is The Best Go Green Method to Save Money.

I’m sure you’ve all read the posts on laundry detergent, compost piles, insulation, rain-barrels and gardening and I’ve implemented most of those things into my life already so I was trying to think of something a little more off the beaten path and I started thinking…

If you’ve read Shane’s post from Beating Broke on my blog today you’ll know that in order for him to jump on the ‘green’ bandwagon, it has to be frugal! So with that in mind you should know that unlike Shane I’m willing to drop a pretty penny to ‘go green’. I’ll buy the fancy paint and the fancy insulation and the organic clothing – locally manufactured stuff – even though it costs twice as much as the stuff right next to it. I’m not sure if I’m harboring a bit of a crazy Greenpeace-style environmentalist inside me or what’s going on with that. In any case, in the past I’ve been willing to spend MORE to go green than to do things the ‘normal’ way. Because of that (perhaps a little crazy) mindset I had a tough time coming up with a topic to go green and be cheap! I really had to dig for the cheapo inside me to come up with something:

I recently purchased a wonderful piece of technology, the Sony Arc, and while I’m a bit of a geek anyway it was my first smartphone and let me say this; I’m never going back to whatever-it-is-I-had-pre-smartphone. The problem is that with that one fancy piece of technology you can end up spending A LOT of money on add-ons. Have you ever checked out the Android or iPhone market? Have you seen how many ubercool apps there are… for like a few dollars? I got a headset too, I considered a hands-free for in the car… It’s easy to let go of the frugal mind-set in these situations. But I found a way to make this fancy phone work in my favor;

Aside from being a technology-lover I’m also a bookworm, hello! I blog and read other blogs! I LOVE reading! When one of my friends found out about my smart phone purchase he emailed me an ebook in epub format. In the weeks following this he sent me a few more that I devoured and I then downloaded several apps (for FREE!) that allow you to browse, select and download ebooks for a fraction of the price of real books. In fact there are thousands of free books out there.

Because I’m currently going through a big-crazy renovation I’m purging a lot of stuff and I’m letting go of a lot of my books, there are very few books that I will re-read and unless I keep something as reference material it really just ends up sitting on the shelf collecting dust.

I’ve found ebooks to be a fabulous way to actually spend more time doing something I love while saving cash and saving a few trees that would otherwise end up in the form of a book-collecting dust on my shelf. I read in the car, on breaks at work, on the bikes at the gym and I’ll even sneak in a few pages while in bed. I’ve finished a few books already in the past weeks and today transferred another 76 titles to my phone. (Yes you read that right!)

If you haven’t tried ebooks, I highly recommend them – and the ones you really love you can always pick up at a yard sale at a later date to add to your collection.

(Editors Note: Since we’re on the subject of ebooks, this would be an excellent time for you to pick up a copy of the Beating Broke Guide to Your Credit Score)