I love browsing book stores, but I'm mostly trying to cut down on the rate at which I buy books, so I've adopted a system.

1. The primary purpose of browsing a book store is not to buy books, it's to find books that I might want to read.
2. Most books I might want to read I don't need to read now and instead I take a picture of them to note for later.
3. If I find any books that I want to read, I must buy at least one as a way of thanking and not simply leeching off the book store.

The wish list experiment

I have a public amazon wishlist as a way for people to say thanks to me for anything I've done they appreciate.

It's been going really well so far. It gives me a way of fulfilling the "I want to buy this book" urge without actually buying the book, and I love just getting random surprise books in the mail from time to time.

I have a goodreads shelf of books that people have bought me along with reviews.

I've been going from tracking the amount of time I spend reading to actually noting down what it's spend on and am doing weekly blog posts about it.

It's both very personally satisfying and also seems to produce quite an interesting list I think.

I'm finding the move back to physical books from Kindle quite interesting. It seems to work better with habits of deep concentration for me - the Kindle has little too much of the "I'm bored. Let me just change tabs and see what else is here" effect of electronic devices because it's basically a library in a tiny box.

I'm still using the Kindle for fiction, but I seem to have mostly switched to physical for non-fiction (and not just because of gifting)