3% own more than 1000 physical books; only 1% own more than 1000 ebooks.
3% say they organize their books by color. Six times as many under 30s do as those over 65.
Which 3% are you? Not that I can’t guess given where I’m asking the question.
At least the survey shows that most people own at least one book. And an amazing 24% minimum own more than 100. Great.
As I have moved I have had less space. 1,000 books take up a lot of room. I wonder if not having a thousand books is more about not having a big enough home than it is not wanting books.
That said, while I read a lot, I doubt I have read close to 1,000 books in my whole life. More like several hundred (I’d say 10 per year since I was a teen). My GF, who reads way more than I do, I doubt has a thousand books under her belt. That’s a lot. (Although she might…I will ask her)
I’m barely over a thousand at this point, I was once about 6,000.
Organization is a little weird now after being very organized.
Most Tolkien books are in my office with cook books and comic collections like Calvin and Hobbs and The Far Side. The game room has all the Role-playing game books, coffee tables books and some history books.
Fantasy and Sci-Fi in my bedroom. Biographies and general non-fiction in our hallway shelves.
The old house had floor to ceiling book shelves in the living room. Family room, my bedroom, more books in the office, more in the basement and even a bunch of sports books in the utility room. I had a problem I guess.
I’m pretty sure I never owned over 1000. I did own over 100, but no longer do, as I got rid of a lot in my move. Most of them were books I’d never read again anyways–which is also why I never really organized them.
I got most of my reading from the library, only occasionally buying books that I really loved. Books were just too expensive for general purchase. Most I owned were gifts or people giving them away or selling them very cheap.
Amazon tells me I have 3243 ebooks (including one of yours). I’m sure this includes a substantial number that I got for free (as well as a heck of a lot that I bought cheap when they were on sale). And it doesn’t include ebooks that I’ve bought/acquired from other sources.
Unlike with physical books, I don’t have to worry about where to store them all, and there’s not really a way to sell, trade, or give away the ones I’m finished with, so once I “own” them, they stay owned.
I’ve never counted my books, but I’m pretty sure that I’m in somewhere around the 97th percentile in number owned. And I’m certain I’ve read over a thousand: I don’t get through nearly as many any more, but from around fourth grade through the end of high school, I had a consistent three-per-week habit (of course, at the younger end, those would have been shorter books, but I was also always several years above my grade level).
I have about 2200 physical books that are catalogued, and a few hundred more that are in storage and not yet catalogued. I don’t know offhand how many ebooks I own. It’s probably a few hundred, but close to 90 percent are in the public domain and downloaded from Project Gutenberg and similar sites for free. Those I paid money for number in the dozens, I guess. Most of my physical nonfiction books are organized by Library of Congress call numbers (at least in theory–I often don’t reshelve them properly) and fiction is organized by the author’s surname.
Thank you!
Technically I would be in the 6% who don’t know how many books they have. But it would be disingenuous to not put myself in the more than 1000 group. My hunch is that it’s around 15,000, including a thousand or two of my wife’s.
Have I read them all? Sadly, no. I have a habit of buying a bag of books a a library sale that look alluring at the time but less so when I get home. I balance those by taking out a steady stream of new books from libraries, so I don’t have to pay new book prices. Seriously, you only get to 15,000 books by being cheap.
And for all those proclaiming the ease of storage of ebooks, I admit that my time is increasingly preoccupied with figuring out how to dispose of them. Nevertheless I love physical books and continue to think that ebooks are somehow not real, even if people are kind enough to buy mine.
Well, that’s just insane. I line 'em up alphabetically by height.
The color thing is a decorator “trick” that got popular. To me, it looks old hat and outdated, because anything that starts as a trend usually rapidly descends into annoying boredom.
I’ve probably owned several thousand books in my life, because I’m continually buying new, then, deaccessioning ones due to lack of space. I read a little more than a book a week on average. Some books will take me a full week to get read in small chunks. Then, there are times when I read three or four books a week. Being retired, my average has gone up.
I have about 1,000 physical books.
They are organised by author (of course.)
I am over 65.
There you go…
I’ve easily owned many more than 1000 books, but the most I’ve ever had on my shelves at any one time is probably around 500. Right now the count is around 300, haphazardly organized by topic.
Although my initial thought was that I can’t possibly have that many, I just did a rough count, and damned if I don’t have at least 1000, and probably a couple hundred more, especially if we’re counting books in boxes. For the shelved books, non-fiction is by subject; fiction is alpha by author. I have the non-fiction loosely grouped by bookcase, so most of the history is in the upstairs hall, most of the biographies in the den, etc. I appear to have about 1800 Kindle books, but some of those are duplicates of the physical books on my shelf.
This may be a symptom of some kind of mental illness.
Maybe 300 or so, tho quite a few are in storage 1000 miles away from my new home.
Is there a distinction to be made between books owned and books actually read?
It seems owning 15,000 books is very different from having read 15,000 books. If someone read one book a day, every day, it would take over 40 years to read 15,000 books (including the wife’s books).
And then I wonder why someone would own a book they never will read.
I own over 1000 physical books stored haphazardly over my one bedroom apartment(I live alone BTW.)
About 3,000 books, and that’s what’s on my shelves at work and home. I have not read all of all them; most are non-fiction and they are the tools of my trade. Just as a mechanic buys sets of wrenches even though they may use some of them rarely, perhaps never, I have books to use to write lectures for courses, talks for the public, and to keep on top of the fields I work in.
These change, and I don’t always get rid of books on subjects I’m unlikely to return to, so despite regularly carting books off, more keep coming in. There are very few I haven’t ransacked for something or other or that are on the “Next Projects” shelf. It recently occurred to me that puttering about in books is what I do instead of puttering around with tools in a shed. I’m not sure that makes me feel better or worse.
Akin to a cookbook? Something you go to from time-to-time but never actually read cover-to-cover?
Many of them, yes. “Damn, I’m teaching a segment on slavery next semester. What’s some of the new literature? What do I need to know to be on top of it? What can I steal, er, pay homage to, for a lecture?”