How to stop buying books you already own at the book fair
· 4 min read
Every regular visitor of a book fair has a story about coming home with a third copy of the same title. The cause is simple: your library is at home, and the stand is not.
Carry your catalogue, not your memory
Memory fails most on the books you care about most, the ones you have read about for years and finally find in a stall. Having your library searchable on your phone turns a guess into a lookup.
Search by title or author, or scan the ISBN when the book has one. A good search ignores small differences: with Arabic titles, a missing diacritic or a different form of alef should not hide a match.
Know the three answers you need
Already owned: leave it. Not owned: buy it. And the one people forget, owned but incomplete. For a multi-volume work, the useful answer is which volumes you have, so you can see that volume 3 is the one missing.
Mind the edition
A critical edition with a scholar's notes is not the same book as a cheap reprint of the same text. Record the editor and the publisher so that you can decide knowingly whether a second edition is worth it.
Where Qimtar fits
Qimtar has a check designed for this moment: type a title or an ISBN and it tells you whether the book is owned in paper or digital form, whether a series is incomplete, or whether it is new to you. It runs in the browser on your phone.