For the purposes of this poll, the books should be in your household, but don’t necessarily have to be owned by you personally, so your kids’ and spouse’s books should be taken into consideration. (But don’t count your house-mate’s books, or your spouse’s work library.) This poll is inspired by my doing some sorting out and getting rid of quite a few books. We now have about 500 left.
I sorted out and donated a ton of books about a year ago. I donated every book I hadn’t read at all in the past few years. I kept a ton of D&D source books, books I loved, and I didn’t get rid of any of his books (he hardly has any).
It felt sooooooo good. Now I have so much more room. And it may be coming time to do another purge.
I didn’t actually bother to count but somewhere between 80-100 physical books and around 40-50 ebooks. So the 100-249 bracket.
It does feel good, although I’d like to get rid of even more. A lot of our books are kid’s books which should be outgrown in a couple of years. And I really try not to hold onto fiction unless I love it because that’s what libraries are for.
I own thousands of books. Last count over 3,000.
I did donate quite a few to the local library recently, stuff I know I’ll never read again. Not that you’d notice - my bookshelves are still overflowing.
I would say right around 250-275. I have 3 book cases that are pretty much filled to capacity. A good 80-90% have not been read yet, and at least 50% of them I got this past year from misc. people getting rid of books. After I read a book, I will usually give it away. The only reason I keep books is if I will re-read or reference them, or think they are so good that I’ll want to loan them out.
We like to keep our books, so I’d estimate that we have over 2000 in the house now. I’m fine with having so many as long as we can keep them nicely shelved. Someday we’ll run out of room for bookshelves and start purging.
Mine was 250-499, though that’s a guess. I’ve managed to get rid of quite a few lately - the number was once much, much higher.
I finally told myself that anything I got rid of and was interested in reading later, I could find at the library. If I couldn’t find it there, and it was no longer available, and I really really wanted to read it again, then I could kick myself for it.
No kicking yet. 
I used to own thousands of hard copy books, but have been on a donating/trashing/selling spree recently, especially since getting my Kindle DX. I’m down to approximately 400 physical books, and up to 277 on my Kindle.
I’m in the process of reorganizing the library. In order to do this, I had to do a purge. We wound up donating over 500 books to a local charity. Just eyeballing tells me I’ve got at least 3 times that many left.
One of my hobbies is collecting certain first editions. I have all of Stephen King’s trade first hardback editions, and many of the signed limited releases as well. I also collect books from Arkham House publishing. So there’s about 400 books or so on those shelves. Then add the various other hardbacks and paperbacks, and it comes up to something around 700 total.
I might have under-estimated, but I don’t think I’m over 1000.
Between paperback, hardback, and e-books, I have at least 2000, which is about half of what I had 10 years ago, when I lost a majority of them to mold and mildew damage from improper storage.
I used to have a lot more, but I got rid of a LOT when I went into the Peace Corps, and recently some asshole at the USPS stole a bunch of my books, as well as my entire DVD collection, cutting it down further.
Oh well, it’s not like I have time to read anyway.
Having just boxed, moved and going through the process of reshelving every blasted one of them I have a pretty good idea. There were 275 to 300 boxes, enough to fill 4 built-ins. Including a few series like WorldBook, Encyclopedia, ChildCraft, etc, probably 2500 to 3000.
I don’t think there’s any way my dad, easily the most voracious reader I’ve ever known, would have less than 10,000. The walls of two houses, one office and a garage are full of them, mostly on history, philosophy, religion, banking, etc. The first couple of months after they moved into their home they kept me busy building floor to ceiling bookshelves.
I have owned over 500 but I kept losing them whenever we moved, or having to leave them behind.
I’ve owned four copies of Raymond Feist’s Silverthorn.
Darn! If you were in Gainesville, Florida, I’d ask to come over and see.
It’s getting lower all the time. I have four grocery bags of books next to my desk that need dusted and dropped off at Goodwill.
We have a modest-sized house (about 1000 sq. ft), with a full basement - we have more room than we know what to do with, so we have bookshelves, and I’ve read almost everything worth reading on them, and I’ll re-read most of them, too. Voracious readers have to keep a lot of books on hand.
At least a couple thousand. I’ve never counted, and I’m afraid to.
In the high end of 100-249. That is ONLY because we got rid of a metric fuckton of books when we relocated about a year and a half ago. We’ve also worked pretty hard to keep our book collection down since our apartment is kind of small - we’ll trade in books for store credit at a secondhand bookstore once in a while.