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.

[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.

[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.

[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 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).

[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.

[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".

[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.

[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 :->

[lalajia.livejournal.com]

"I had to get rid of pretty much all of my books in the divorce/move to Scotland"

This :(

About four massive boxes of books given away to a jumble sale, another one earmarked for ebay & amazon, and I've lost over half of my collection :( Not counting whatever ones "accidentally" stayed with my former husband.

[erindubitably.livejournal.com]

A bit of both!

Actually, that being said, I only keep the really bad romance novels, the mediocre ones Morag makes me get rid of. :P

[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.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

http://bookmooch.com/ !

[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.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine a house without book shelves!

[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!

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Well, the house has them even though I don't - there are six of us who live there and only me who doesn't like hard copy books. It's a mental health thing for me - the more physical objects I can see, the more things I feel I should be doing simultaneously, which is not a good state of affairs. Every paper book I can see calls out "read me, read me", which gets a bit overwhelming. Ebooks don't do it to anything like the same extent (although it does happen a little, which is why I archive them off the Kindle once I've read them.)

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I have all my epubs in a folder in Dropbox, and they're tiny enough that they vanish into my quota.

[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.