[Whisperzzzzzzz]

I have reached a point where I have too many books for the shelf space available, and I'm not quite sure what to do about it!

I have several hundred books, and don't own a home. Whenever my wife and I move, I have to pack up all my books and lug them to the new place.

A few years ago, I had mostly switched to reading on my e-reader. The warm backlight! The ease of switching books on a whim! The ability to set a standard font and size across every book! The portability! The halcyon days seemed to unfold in front of me. I would buy fewer books and read more!

(As an aside, the death of the mass market paperback is abso-fucking-lutely terrible for making it easy to read on the go. Good luck fitting a trade paperback in your back pocket or even into a sling bag.)

And, for a time, this was true.

I bought fewer paper books — only those whose spines I coveted seeing on my shelves made the cut. This allowed me to temporarily set aside the Too Many Books problem. Yet, in recent times, I have yearned more and more to return to the simplicity and single-purposity of paper books. The e-reader carries too many distractions, and in the end, its be-screened-ness (even if it is e-ink) is a distraction in and of itself. I have been seeking to unbundle my device — moving from a state of one thing for everything to many things, each for one thing. A multi-purpose world to a single-purpose world.

As another layer, as I think about having children, I become more and more concerned about what behaviors and values I will model for them. Even if I know that I'm reading a book on my e-reader, they won't. They'll just see a flat slab with a screen, akin to every other flat slab with a screen. I'd much rather them see me reading paper books and grow up appreciating the medium, instead of The Great Flattening where every method of consumption is relegated to the flat slab with a screen.

These two factors have converged in a renewed desire to read paper books. Yet, if I want to keep adding to my collection, I need to subtract from it too. It has grown to be a heaped up great pile, books beyond count, hoarded by a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm...oh wait, that was Smaug. Anyway, while my collection is not quite a dragon's hoard, it is certainly straining the shelf space I can allot to it.

I know there are many books I want to keep — books I cherish and look at fondly on my shelf, enjoying both their gilded spines (I'm looking at you, Fitz and The Fool UK Editions!) and the memories they surface. There are many other books who I look at and can appreciate their role as essential links in the chain of my reading history (definitely not like the chains Karsa drags behind him, right?), but which are not really books I strongly desire to keep. In some cases, they're books I read but didn't even really love.

I just feel like if I give them away, I lose something of myself. Something that reminds me of what I really am, that is a part of my history and my self-image.

How do you all handle this? How do you say "thank you and goodbye" to books?

This post has been edited by Whisperzzzzzzz: 14 March 2026 - 11:29 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

Send your books to me Whisperzzzzzz I may get in trouble as we also have no space but I'll deal with that when I get to it.

To actually answer your question I've learned to be brutal. I ask myself "am I going to read this again?" And if the answer is anything less than an absolute yes, it's days are numbered.

It helps that most physical books I buy these days are from charity shops so it's not like I've put a lot of money into them, and chances are they're not in pristine condition.

[Macros]

Same.
Annual audit, give me a reason to keep you Mr book or you gone!

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Throwing away old books tends to bring back memories for me... of reading them in various locations, where I was intellectually, how they were influencing my thinking, what else I was reading, etc. (For me it's also complicated by the notes and fragments of poems and songs I tended to write in the margins.)

This may be too obvious to mention, but one partial solution is to take photos of the covers (and perhaps of marked passages as well, if you can find them) and write down digital notes on everything you want to remember.

Or... if your main concern is about letting your children see what you're reading, you could get something like the ThinkBook Plus to display the book covers on the back:



One obvious argument against modeling that particular behavior would be that children may have a harder time resisting the distractions and temptations provided by digital devices, though parents should be able to customize them with parental passwords to mitigate that, and many e-readers are just for reading e-books (but unfortunately the laptop isn't a dedicated e-reader).

Seems strange that there apparently aren't any e-readers which can display what's being read on the front, since it can also serve the pro-social function of giving strangers an easy way to strike up conversations, especially if they have shared interests, and in some cases an excuse to move a bit past perfunctory small talk. OTOH it's possible that some people really are worried about being accused of "performative reading"---though the "backlash" seems to be mostly in (perhaps not precisely infinite) jest. Of course if people were in an environment where they were concerned about that they could set the front display to something else (maybe an impossible object...).

[Cause]

I gave up my book collection years ago. It gave me a huge thrill to start with a. Empty bookshelf and slowly but surely fill it up. Had a sense of achievement and it looks good too. I went the way of the kindle and reading Malazan on kindle in bed was a lot easier.

I can’t remember the last paper book I read. However I do miss the shelf. I recently remarked to a friend that you can’t know me from my apartment. No books on shelves, no game collection, no movie or music collection. Everything is digital these days. It’s more convenient but we are losing something.

Is it blasphemous to suggest possibly keeping the covers but not the books?

This post has been edited by Cause: 20 March 2026 - 03:32 AM

[Tsundoku]

Cause, on 20 March 2026 - 03:21 AM, said:

Is it blasphemous to suggest possibly keeping the covers but not the books?

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[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Cause, on 20 March 2026 - 03:21 AM, said:

I gave up my book collection years ago. It gave me a huge thrill to start with a. Empty bookshelf and slowly but surely fill it up. Had a sense of achievement and it looks good too. I went the way of the kindle and reading Malazan on kindle in bed was a lot easier.

I can't remember the last paper book I read. However I do miss the shelf. I recently remarked to a friend that you can't know me from my apartment. No books on shelves, no game collection, no movie or music collection. Everything is digital these days. It's more convenient but we are losing something.

Is it blasphemous to suggest possibly keeping the covers but not the books?

I used to tear the covers off and put them on my walls.

Obviously it's easier with dust jackets...

Sans couverture, most books look French:




... the horror, the horror!


[Edit: apparently French "genre fiction" is usually an exception---with literary "genre fiction" sometimes being an exception to that exception.]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 20 March 2026 - 11:20 AM

[amphibian]

I generally buy paper versions of books I know I want to keep a long time. The fluff or the unknown, I buy ebook.

[QuickTidal]

amphibian, on 20 March 2026 - 11:59 AM, said:

I generally buy paper versions of books I know I want to keep a long time. The fluff or the unknown, I buy ebook.

This is how I operate these days. After my big purge when I moved this has been my sacrosanct rule. Only buy physical copies of fave authors who I collect. Everything else is ebook.

[champ]

QuickTidal, on 20 March 2026 - 12:31 PM, said:

amphibian, on 20 March 2026 - 11:59 AM, said:

I generally buy paper versions of books I know I want to keep a long time. The fluff or the unknown, I buy ebook.

This is how I operate these days. After my big purge when I moved this has been my sacrosanct rule. Only buy physical copies of fave authors who I collect. Everything else is ebook.

The only books I buy nowadays are the special editions / fancy prints otherwise it is just easier / more convenient to read electronically. Originally I was set against ebooks but the convenience has just taken over.

I have 100s of books just stashed in boxes that I'll never read again, debated giving them away but it's tough.