The Best $50 Bucks You Will Ever Spend: The Power of an eReader, ebooks, and Your Local Library

Almost every single “Be Successful Like Successful People” article you will ever read will say something to the effect of, “Mrs. Johnson reads 17 books a month!” Or, “F. Rodinhem always takes a book with him.” Or, “Susan Sassafras says, ‘The best education I ever got was when I started reading books that I wanted to read!” And after you have read a smorgasbord of those articles, you will plainly see most successful people read. And, they read a lot.

Here’s what you can do on the cheap to keep up!

I live in San Antonio, TX. It’s a great city, full of great people, food, happenings, and libraries. Not only are there libraries dotting seemingly every inch of the city, but the library system has a tremendous online presence, too. That’s right! Books! Online! For you to download! All for the amazing price of FREE (Thanks to tax payers like yourself and me and others and me and others). The best $50 you can ever spend, then, is getting yourself an Amazon Kindle Fire. Why? Because the San Antonio library system! Get that? Free access to an amazing catalog of books after spending a one-time fee of $50! Without leaving your couch or without leaving that fancy coffee shop you’re in, you can download tons of digital content. They even have digital magazines (yup,magazines)! Come on!

Get your library card, get a Kindle Fire, and then download a free app called Overdrive. Overdrive grants you access to download said online content. Also, the SAPL (San Antonio Public Library) offers free audio books, too!

After you’ve collected the exploded bits of your blown-up brain, here’s some more free stuff. Download another free app called RBDigital. It also offers even more magazines with a more convenient form of reading them compared to Overdrive. Also also, for those living in Bexar County, you have access to the county’s own online library called Bibliotech. It offers, brace yourself, free books, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, music, and movies!

Buy yourself a $50 Kindle Fire! I have been using mine for 3 years now, and I can’t imagine living without it. I download books to my Overdrive app, turn off the wi-fi, and enjoy almost any book I can imagine. Also also also, San Antonio’s libraries are full of DVDs of movies and shows. And not just classic movies and shows, I’m talking about the new summer blockbusters and hit seasons of new HBO shows. Pretty much, whatever movies or shows that have just been released to DVD or Blu-ray (Yup. They have Blu-ray movies, too), you can borrow them from your local library.

Join a library. Borrow some books and some movies. Buy a Kindle. Download the apps and the books. Exercise your mind as much as you exercise your body, or lead us to believe you do through your Instagram posts. Yeah! That’s right! I’m talking to you! I know that “Morning exercise” picture you posted was taken yesterday, and this morning you were lazy and didn’t leave your kitchen table. You still have doughnut crumbs on your jam jams!

How about this at least? Take one of those pretty “Morning coffee with my morning book” pictures and post that. People insta-like those, too.

Requirements for getting your San Antonio Public Library Card

22 Books That Expand Your Mind and Change The Way You Live (Darius Foroux)

Brian & Joe’s Recommended Reading List (Brian Buffini)