I think we have books in every room of the house except for the bathrooms and kitchen. We would probably have books there if space was not at a premium. So I have been trying to minimize book purchases, not just because of cost, but because there is no space left for new book shelves, and our current shelves are full.
I have been trying to use the library in lieu of buying books. We have a wonderful library system, the Pikes Peak Library District, which allows us to reserve books on-line. I recently discovered that the Firefox add-on Book Burro can search the Pikes Peak Library District catalog system, when it sees me looking up a book on Amazon.com. It makes it relatively trivial to reserve the book, without having to re-enter the search parameters in Sirsi, the application which maintains the catalog. The add-on will also provide prices for a book from various on-line providers, but I am trying to avoid them, since we don’t need more books.