I have too many books. Help!

Cafe Society
21

Back in college (due to years of working libraries and having access to Friend of… discards) I had about 10,000 books.

I thought of myself as a collector. I loved books. Each was a precious object and to discard it would be to leave a hole in my collection. Then I took a class offer by a local antiquarian bookseller.

He started the first session by saying “Most of you here are not book collectors, you are book accumulators.” Something about that stuck with me and ever since I’ve never had any trouble at all getting rid of books (and then my library science degree did much to convey that few books are artifactually interesting and only have value so far as they are filling a need).

I suggest you pick ten crappy paperbacks that you must admit you’ll never read again and go throw them in a dumpster. Don’t donate them. Don’t try to convince a friend that they want it. Just in the trash, eventually to be shredded and pulped and turned into toilet paper. Wait a week to be sure the world doesn’t end.

Then go through the collection and box up anything you admit you’ll probably never open again and can’t create an artifactual reason (actual market value or personal emotional value) and get those sold or donated.

For those on the border where you think you might actually have some use for them, but probably not, put them in a box, close the box and write a date 2 years in the future on the box. When that date arrives, donate or sell any books still in the box (it’ll be all of them).

The end result will be a library that is actually useful to you. You’ll know what’s in it and what’s in it will be valuable or useful to you.

But if you have to have them all, then many of the indexing tools listed above are good. Just make sure it is something you can access remotely because it won’t do you any good to have a nice database at home if you are standing in Barnes & Noble.

22

If they are packed densely together their flammability drops. That’s the excuse I give my wife for why my bookshelves are packed so tightly.

23

I’m not overly concerned about the roof-beams collapsing under the weight of a few boxes of books. :smiley:

Really, as I said, this is simply a temporary storage solution until I get around to a further cull into “stuff I want to keep as momentos” and “stuff to give away”. Worrying about my house collapsing under the weight of the books, and my body found crushed, is somewhat … premature.

I have some books I would want to keep in storage, but not necessarily taking up room on my shelves - for example a complete set of books on WW2 published during the war, year by year. Interesting but very bulky.

24

I used to sound like you, OP. Then I decided that my books were getting better treatment in my house than I was. I got rid of thousands. I have closer to 100 books now, and I mostly get rid of them as I reread. It’s freeing.

25

You’ve got to catalog. Got to. And then you have to have the catalog in a portable form that you take with you whenever you’re in a bookstore or library book sale or yard sale or other tempting sight. I have a simple three-ring notebook, using nothing more complicated than Word. Two columns per page, tiny font. All I use is title, author, and edition (mostly so I know if I want to upgrade to a hardback first). I can write in a new title as soon as I buy it and then put it onto the computer later. This has saved me rebuying a thousand books.

I started this long before the Internet, of course. As others have said, there are ways of doing this electronically now. From what I understand those are easier to deal with if you get mostly newer books that have ISBNs. Whatever works for you.

Here’s one unforeseen consequence of cataloging. At some point early on you’ll say to yourself, why do I have that? And then you can get rid of it.

All of this goes up exponentially if you have a spouse who also buys books, especially if you have even mildly overlapping tastes.

26

Some people collect cars, some cats. You collect books.

27

I’m afraid I can’t help you. The last book count I did was over 7,000. That was three years and many garage sales ago. I’m a firm believer in Anna Quindlen’s wise declaration that, “decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”

28

I used to think that, too, but man oh man it feels so good to have room to move in my flat now! I’ve given away over 3000 books. If I had the space, I’d have kept them, but I really didn’t and it sounds like you don’t either. Anyway, it’s better to share the joy by giving someone else the chance to read them - and make money for charity at the same time.

29

One of these days, I’m going to get my books cataloged so I quit buying dups. I’m not sure if it’s age or just having too many. I didn’t used to have this problem.

As I catalog, I’m also going to cull. What I do with the culls will depend on what they are and condition. Sell, trade, donate, toss.

I’ve only been saying this for a couple of years. :stuck_out_tongue: But I’ve gotten some other stuff almost wrapped up, so I have hopes of starting this project soon.

Fortunately, I’ve got a really big house. I’ve seen bookstores with fewer books than I have. And that’s before I inherited Mom’s collection.

I am considering an ebook reader, for at least some stuff. I’m mostly waiting to see what settles out of the format wars. Then I’ll see if I can give up more of the physical books. I do re-read a lot of them, when I’m out of new.

I don’t read nearly as much as I used to, either. I only buy books once every month or two now, as opposed to the weekly dozen or so that I used to buy. (I used to joke with the bookstore people: I should take up heroin, it’d be cheaper.)

30

Because of a recent house remodel I had to pack up all of my books into boxes. Those boxes filled about half my garage stacked seven feet high! When the remodel was finished which included nice built-in bookcases I started to unpack my books for reshelving. That was a perfect time for me to decide which books really deserved a spot in the new bookcases. I first discarded any dups and books that had way outdated info (like financial advice books from decades ago). Then I pulled out any books on subjects that are of zero interest to me at this point of my life. Most of the discarded books went to a local bookstore’s donation bin, but I also had to toss a lot of old textbooks, encyclopedia volumes, and computer manuals in the garbage recycle bins. Felt quite liberating to tell you the truth and the house definitely felt a lot lighter. I used to think you can’t have too many books, but not anymore. Nowadays I’m much more selective in adding physical books to my library and will always look for an electronic version first.

31

I bought a Kindle, kept my collectable books and any in paperback that i hadn’t read yet, still buy books by my favorite authors in print, read paper books for the scent of them and the tactile sense occasionally, and donated the rest (about 20 bankers boxes full) to a favorite charity. I chose a local rabbit rescue.

Now, I have room in my house to live.

Of course, I have a three year old and am engaged to another bibliophile who has two children of his own. We want another child in the nearish future. We had to get rid of books to make room for kids.

32

Register as an Amazon book seller and sell them off. You won’t get much $ but at least the books will go to people who want to read them.

33

This is an excellent approach! Start small and go from there. When you realize that the world hasn’t ended when the first 10 books go out the door, next time you can donate or throw out 15, or 20, or… whatever doesn’t make you break out in hives. And if you donate to your local library (as I do), reassure yourself that the books are either (a) going to find a loving home, or (b) sure to be enjoyed by new readers, or (c) obsolete/useless/crappy and thus better gone anyway.

34

I have an app on my iPhone to keep track of my books, Book Crawler. It’s not perfect, but it works. I’ve stopped buying duplicates since I always have my phone with me when I’m at a book sale or a book store.

I know I should get rid of some of the 1,500 books, but for right now I’m focused on just not buying very many more.

35

One of the huge number of projects I’ve labelled “OPERATION SOPHIE TUCKER” (for Some of these Days) is the cataloging of my books. I’m a librarian, I know how, and for a library the size of mine (i.e. not an academic library with millions of volumes) it’s not even hard: for non-fiction just go to the LoC catalog, copy the call numbers, and put them on adhesive labels. (Really just the top couple of lines- I don’t need the MARC record or anything, just a general classification system.) For fiction just go public library and alphabetize them by author, the majority to be placed upon Billy bookshelveswith lights and glass doors and the auxiliary on shelves in my closet, though I do have lust in my heart for Neil Gaiman’s home libraryas well.

But meanwhile the “if there’s a space on the shelf shove it in” and the cardboard boxes labelled ‘And Yet More Frigging Books’ system must suffice.

36

Use goodreads.com (or even just a spreadsheet) to inventory all your books. Sure, it’d be a fairly major undertaking, but it would be a one-time thing.

As much as we love books, we do cull them periodically. Otherwise there’s no ROOM.

And I agree with you on the feel and experience of “dead-tree” books but one advantage of an e-reader is that you never HAVE to get rid of them :).

37

What about when it fills up?

And deleting seems so much more final than putting the box in the attic!

38

Let’s assume the average book takes up 1 megabyte (a fair average given a quick glance at the epubs I have on this laptop).

So a thousand of them is a gig. My Nook Color can supposedly hold 5 gig of memory (8g, but 3g is used by by the OS etc.). So that’s 5,000 books. I think they advertise it as 2,000 books so let’s go with that.

Do you have 2,000 books? Seems pretty likely.

Got an SD card? The Nook Color can take a micro-SD - so if you add a 32g SD card, that’s 6 times the free space on the Nook (5g x 6). So you’re up to 6 x 2,000 books, or 12,000 books. Do you have 12,000 books? Certainly possible but less likely. Anyway, there you are with all those books.

The Kindle Touch only has 4g (but I bet less of it is taken up with the OS). The Kindle Fire, I’m not sure. I don’t know if either of those can take a memory card.

Of course they don’t all have to be on the reader at once. Burn a CD or three and store that in the attic. Hell, put a copy in the safe deposit box, or use an online file server like Dropbox. This way if you lose your device or the card craps out, you still have 'em all.

Note: I’m being contrarian here - if you decided to go with an ereader, no way would you repurchase thousands of books. You wouldn’t even scan / OCR them all. But, it’s an option for some future books.

Personally, I’d make an effort to cull books you truly don’t want any more (they’re buried under all the books you DO want). Then make a list (somewhere), including a notation of where the book usually lives (living room, kitchen, etc.). No more accidental repurchases, and easier to find a book when you want it.

39

Sell on Amazon.

Unwanted books = $ !!!

40

I used to think like you. Then I got a Kindle, and my world changed. Having to find, store, even hold a heavy, falling apart pile of dead trees got so much less desirable when I had better option.

Try it out! It’s only $79.