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.

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# The wish list experiment

I have [a public amazon wishlist](www.amazon.co.uk/registry/wishlist/SSZ403J9X2T0) 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](https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/10776804-david-maciver?utf8=%E2%9C%93&shelf=thanks&per_page=75) of books that people have bought me along with reviews.

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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](http://www.drmaciver.com/2016/05/weekly-reading-post-1/).

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

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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)