I don't lend out or give books to people very often. Not because I'm stingy when it comes to my book collection; I often take books that I'm done with and leave them on benches in public places. Interestingly, in my town, this is a common practice: when people are finished reading a book, they leave it in public for someone else to pick up and read it, and then return it to the benches when they're done. It's like a street library with no late fees. (but fairly poor selection.)

I do that out of respect for other people's time and attention. I'd actually give away most of my books to anyone who expressed in reading one of them, just because I'm a big fan of passing the ideas forward. But if you give someone a book to read, there's a chance it will put pressure on them to read it. And asking someone to read a book is asking a very large time commitment from them.

I use books in a very different way than most people, and part of that might be because I don't value my own time very much. I read lots of negative reviews on Amazon for books, and very frequently the reviewer says something like, "The author of this terrible book owes me the five hours I spent reading it." They feel frustrated that they sunk time into reading a book they didn't enjoy. In other cases, negative reviews are clearly coming from readers who had different expectations of the book before they started reading it.

For me, I almost never perceive reading a book as a waste of time. I can't remember the last time I read a book and didn't get something out of it. Almost every book contains at least one idea that I can use, or I end up learning a handful of vocabulary words that I wasn't familiar with before. And I've never evaluated the effectiveness of a book based on how it met my expectations going into it; instead, I evaluate it based on how different of a person I am after having read it. If I learned something, if I'm entertained, if it changed my way of thinking in a way that I had hoped for, then I deem it a success.