A last resort for addicted and compulsive book buyers, print and electronic, a satire in Daydreaming on the Porch

I attended my first ABBA (Addictive Book Buyers Anonymous) meeting tonight. And I thought I was bad off? There were people there who were ordering books on Amazon while others were giving their book addiction testimonies. Quite rude. Even I could refrain from this for the first half hour, anyway.

But I think this might be the answer to my SOS. I found out about the group through an online search. I came across their homepage, which was informative and listed meeting times and places. To attend meetings, one must create an account with a user name and password. This seemed reasonable.

The moderator of the group is a former book buying addict from Muncie, Indiana, who realized she needed help when her front door wouldn’t open because it was blocked by piles of unopened Amazon book parcels. She got the Friends of the Library to feel sorry for her with a sobbing tale of woe, and they came and hauled away a Pod full of books for their next sale.

She now gets her books exclusively from the library, but has accumulated $283 in late fines for overdue books she can’t possibly return on time.

At the meeting tonight she asked us for advice about how to avoid getting fines like that in the future because her previous book-buying addiction just about bankrupted her.

She did manage to quit Amazon cold turkey, but said she hasn’t been right in the head ever since.

This was obviously very discouraging for the attendees to hear, as one of the group members told of hitting the Amazon “Buy Now” button compulsively like a rat in one of those Pavlovian experiments. The man, who called himself “Fernando” to protect his identity, said only a “higher power” could prevent his flagrantly obsessive book buying from becoming his own personal “Waterloo.”

Last updated August 28, 2022