Do you still buy books to learn new things?

This is a Book Week post for Saturday’s Holiday Learning theme.

Do you still buy books when you want to learn something new? Our bookshelves (and basement and loft) are bulging with my many computer programming and software books bought years ago and most of them out of date, not to mention the copious huge number of language-teaching books and philosophy texts – oh yes, and a fair few pregnancy and parenting guides.

Whenever I started a new course or bought a new piece of software, I used to have to buy four or five different books about it. I think I thought that the more books on a subject I owned, the more I would be able to take in. Of course, owning the book isn’t actually enough – you do have to read it as well and, to take it in properly, you usually need to make notes, do exercises or something else to fix the information in your head.

I have so many, probably completely worthless, software guides – Illustrator 7, Dreamweaver 4, Microsoft Office 97. Somehow, I don’t think they’ll fetch anything on Ebay, and probably wouldn’t even be taken off my hands on Freecyle. So what should I do with them? If anyone knows of a market for old software guides – perhaps someone could make a piece of art out of them, for example – do let me know.

Thankfully, the other books – the philosophy texts, French and Spanish grammar books, history texts and so on are still relevant and don’t really lose their usefulness. Specific A Level texts are out of date in that they no longer meet a specific curriculum, but the information in them is still interesting and useful. I’ll read them again one day.

These days, my addiction seems to have been stemmed somewhat. My first port of call is the internet, where I will search for and read guides and tutorials and then reviews of books. Instead of walking into a bookshop and filling a basket with a half a shelf of books, I might pick one that is hailed as the definitive guide or the must-read on that subject and order it.

This is a good thing for our bank balance, of course (not just in terms of spending less money on new books, but also because we’d probably need to build an extension or buy a new house to house all the books I’d have accumulated. I fear it’s not too good for the publishing industry, though.

What about you? Do you buy new books when you have something to learn? Do you research the subject (and books available) online first? Or do you limit your reading to the internet?