Tell me what you think about books

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1835691]

Comments

[andrewducker]

Of the books from the last ten years, it's down to not doing a clearout recently. But most of my bookshelf is actually sentimental stuff from the years before that.

Some day I will probably get rid of my Pratchett books, complete with front cover hanging almost entirely off, that I've had since I was 15. But not this year.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I do have some sentimental stuff or stuff I will or do reread that I've bought in the last 10 years but most of the books I own are sentimental stuff from earlier years like you. These days I buy more novels from charity shops than new and they tend to go back again every year or so.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

I don't buy electronic content. If I have paid for something, I want to keep it, at my choice, not at the fiat of some large corporation. Give me physical media or I will just pirate the damned thing.

I like books. They are cheap, robust, need no power, and most of all, second-hand ones can be readily traded meaning that I can acquire as many as I want, with no format-conversion issues, for very little money.

I almost never buy new books and as a point of principle I won't buy ebooks or purely-digital music or anything else - including software, except where there really is no alternative. I have bought one phone app ever, reluctantly. And I don't use it, because of why I don't buy phone apps - because I have changed phone and it doesn't work on my new one.

Books don't suffer that. Ever.

[andrewducker]

I refused to pay for ebooks until I knew I could strip the DRM off of them, for exactly that reason. Now that I can, I don't mind.

Same with music - I won't pay for DRM'd music, but as everyone bar Apple sells plain old MP3 files I don't mind paying for that either (although all my music for the last couple of years has been over Spotify).

[sigmonster.livejournal.com]

It's not like I know *which* 50% I want to re-read in future! All I know is that I re-read a fair proportion of my shelves every year, and also that a fair proportion of my reading is made up of re-reads (these two statements are not equivalent). But the authors and books I tend to te-read change quite often.

[steer.livejournal.com]

One mass clearout of books as a result of moving house to somewhere much much smaller. Now I'm trying to keep myself down to a pair of single-stacked bookshelves... it would be impossible if it wasn't for the fact that I buy mostly electronic books these days.

[naath.livejournal.com]

GET RID OF THINGS; ARE YOU CRAZY.

I'm working on getting the bad books out of the house. It was going to be a "re-read all the books and chuck if bad" plan but actually it is a "look at the blurb, remember how bad it was, chuck it" plan. However the "chuck it" part hasn't happened; they are just piling up in a "to chuck" pile.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

http://bookmooch.com/ !

[chess]

Your assumption is flawed - it suggests that I know which of the books that I have kept I will re-read and which I won't, whereas I don't have that information in advance.

So if I want to keep every book that I have some possibility of re-reading, I need to keep more books than I estimate I will re-read, because I don't know which books will want to be re-read and which won't.

(Not to mention the books that I don't re-read per se, but do use for research when writing fanfic...)

[andrewducker]

I know, after reading a book, whether it's in the "Will definitely re-read", "Will possibly re-read" or "Was written by Tom Clancy" piles. And so I can safely get rid of the last category :->

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

The pile of books in our bedroom got so high this winter that part of it collapsed and almost killed our cat, so she made me take 10 books a week to the used book store every time I have wanted to buy a new book since.

I think I've brought over 600 books to them at this point.

I read about three trashy crime novels a week so they add up.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Your cat made you take books to the bookstore?

[simont]

As chess mentions, there's a "not sure yet" category which makes the percentages difficult to judge, especially in advance.

Most books I buy are ones I already know I like and will want to read again. I almost never change my mind about these ones, and they'll probably stay with me until they fall apart and perhaps beyond.

But sometimes I buy books unread (for whatever reason – because they're new things from an author I generally like, or because they caught my eye and interested me, or because I've been unable to find anyone who can lend me a copy, etc), and although some of those are obvious dross on first reading and go straight on my giveaway pile, a lot of them tend to linger around until I either do read them again or realise that I'm never going to, so they have a sort of "probation period".

[barondave.livejournal.com]

When my girlfriend moved in last year, I had to make room, so I've sold some books. The ones that I'm pretty sure I'd never read again.

On the other hand, the survey is misleading. With few exceptions (the 5% I noted), I didn't sell new books; I found a good home to books I've had around for A Very Long Time and felt no need to reread.

Similarly misleading is "the last novel I bought" response. I recently got a Kindle from said gf and downloaded a bunch of books... all from Project Gutenberg. As a conceptual artist, it amused me greatly that the first book I read electronically on a 2010s device was a Tom Swift book from 1910.

While the idea of buying electronic editions of books isn't completely abhorrent, it will be a while before I bother. Jules Verne/Jane Austen/PG Wodehouse, here I come!

[erindubitably.livejournal.com]

Even if I'm not planning on re-reading a book I don't want to get rid of it, mostly because I might want to lend it out to friends in the future. That being said, I had to get rid of pretty much all of my books in the divorce/move to Scotland and it nearly broke my heart.

[andrewducker]

Either you've never bought an awful book, or you have "friends" you'd like to inflict them on :->

[kmusser]

When I finish a book I try to make an immediate judgement of whether I'll a) ever what to re-read it; b) want to lend it to a friend; or for non-fiction, c) use it as a reference - if the answer to all of those is no, than into the "go away" pile it goes, for the past few years that's generally been about half of them.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

SEWIWEIC: I got rid of all my dead tree books last year, except a few non-fiction ones that I need for reference; but I don't bother to delete e-books even if I'm not going to re-read them, because with the same effort it takes to delete them permanently, I can archive them on the Amazon servers so that they're not taking up any space either on my shelves or on my Kindle.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine a house without book shelves!

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I like owning books - proper paper books that I can put on shelves. I'm constantly surprised at the amount of derision and anger this invites from otherwise apparently reasonable people.

[andrewducker]

I like it too. They make a home feel more homely. I'll definitely have less, and I'm fine with that (They'll be decoration, rather than the entirety of the walls), but I want to have some. Fortunately, large hardbacks and TPBs work well for this, and I can't see those being turned into ebooks any time soon.

And people really should identify with their choices less - there's no reason to get angry with you just because you have different preferences!

[camies.livejournal.com]

It is probably 'sentimental reasons' actually - most of the novels I own but have already read, are by people I know or they're signed copies or they were presents.

[drplokta]

a) I don't know which ones I may want to re-read some day.

b) I buy nearly everything in ebook form, and the cost of storage is negligible.

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

I'm a compulsive collector and somewhere along the line I started measuring my various libraries in shelf-metres* (since the various databases I use to record my various libraries are never up to date). To get rid of books would mean reducing the shelf-space they take up.
[Actually I probably intend to reread everything I own; I just will only get around to rereading a small fraction of it.]

Admittedly I far prefer eBooks these days. They are easier to find, take up less physical room, and the convenience means they are more likely to be reread. And with some books the lack of outrageous shipping and handling costs is definitely a factor that contributes to their enthusiastic adoption.

Besides if I wanted to get rid of the bad books I would have to reread them to make sure, and if they were bad enough to get rid of then they are bad enough that I wouldn't want to reread them. QED.

[For example my SF&F paperback library is well over 150m last time I measured it. Plus another 3 cubic metres of books waiting for more shelves, plus books scattered in all sorts of locations.]

[atreic.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have fully admitted my own mortality yet, and so I believe I have a near infinite amount of time. Until about two years ago, I believed that with an infinite amount of time I would want to reread all my books. Now I have decided that I should only want to reread books that are better than average, rather than just 'enjoyable' (nearly all books are enjoyable, but some books are less enjoyable than other books), so I am being a bit more ruthless and getting rid of most things that get less than three stars on Librarything when I read them.

[fanf]

Something irrelevant which I will mention in the comments: the poll graphs seem to have something against displaying the 0% and 5% answers...

[andrewducker]

They do, don't they. I'll report that as a defect.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

I don't do clearouts as such, but there are a few books I've bought that I wished I hadn't; and they end up on eBay or swapped or given to the chazzer.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I may re-read 5%. I keep about 95%.

The reason is really “Get Rid of Books? Are you insane?” I’ll dress this up with wanting to be able to lend them to my children.

The discrepancy between books I keep and books I’ll read again is why I’m relaxed about the Kindle / Amazon / DRM / file format thing for the time being. If my Kindle broke tomorrow I don’t think there is anything on it that I’d be gutted I didn’t have anymore. This is a conscious policy on my part. I wouldn’t buy text books on a Kindle until they sort out the DRM / file format thing.

I do suspect that in the event of Amazon going bust the administrators will quite happily do you a deal to continue to host your Kindle stuff for a dollar. Better than not hosting it for no dollars.

[fearmeforiampink]

I don't judge you for it, but I actually had a physical shudder reaction when I saw that the modal group was 5 percent. I couldn't imagine rereading so few books that I'd bought.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I have an out-of-control collection, and part of the problem is that getting rid of books is much less interesting than reading or buying them.

[andrewducker]

I'm the same with comics.

[manintheboat.livejournal.com]

I have thousands of books. Very few of them are novels. I'm not very fond of fiction.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

I definitely think I *should* throw out books, I'm just really bad at it. It's irrational to hold onto to books that I'm never going to read again for so long, but I can't quite do it! I've earmarked a couple of terrible books for throwing away - hopefully I'll now be better at it.

Oh, and kindles are awesome :).

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

These days I only keep the novels I intend to reread, due to a shortage of space. When I went to Sri Lanka, the only things I was really concerned about storing were my books, my clothes and my kitchen equipment.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I have had a couple of major clearouts of physical books. My last clear-out rule was it has to be either (a) likely to re-read, (b) sentimental value, (c) genuinely useful potential reference, or (d) classics (my definition) or others my kids might one day want to read. Some of (d) is getting perilously close to vanity shelving if I'm brutally honest.

Despite that, I think I'm well beyond the point where it is entirely implausible that I will read or re-read all the books in my house before I die, unless my reading rate increases back to what it was before jobs and children, and my proportion of re-reading increases substantially. I need to tighten up on criterion (a). I also need to put up just a few more shelves.

My conversion to ebooks merely awaits it becoming easy to get hold of most books I want to read by paying money for legit DRM-free versions.