Get out those measuring tapes…how big is it?

Your book collection.

I thought this was a fun/silly thing to chat about and wanted to share it here.

I use the My Library app on Android to catalog my personal collection (less than 800 books but growing)

Do you ever ‘weed’ your collection? What’s your ratio of print to ebooks? Do you collect in certain subject area(s)? From where do you acquire? (used bookstores, online, new bookstores, etc.)

Thanks for sharing!

  • emb@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    “What the size of your book collection says about you” - I feel like there’s gotta be a bell curve here, with “you don’t read enough” on both sides.

    I’ve got a bunch of books, but it’s faster and easier to buy them than read them.

  • Leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I love the aesthetics of hardback books, a beautiful Victorian-era library looks (and smells!) great but my own library is all ebooks. I don’t have the space for over 2k physical books and as I get older and my eyesight worsens, the ability to adjust font size, line-height, borders, contrast etc becomes invaluable.

    I won’t buy from Amazon at all, ever. I prefer to buy DRM free but if its not possible to buy DRM free then I buy a paperback copy from a local indie bookstore if possible which I immediately donate to a library or hospital or prison or whatever and, ahem, ‘source’ a DRM-free version from elsewhere. I do it this way because DRM is cancer but I also want to support small and/or new authors so buying and passing on a print copy is good for everyone and having a DRM free copy is good for me.

    As for subject matter, both fiction and non-fiction but more fiction than non. I like historical novels like the Aubrey/Maturin series, or the Shardlake series, Madeline Miller’s greek retellings, Hilary Mantel’s stuff, fantasy/sci-f- like Ursula K Leguinn, NK Jemisin, Margaret Attwood, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, Susannah Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Horror/Thrillers by writers like Peter Straub, Catriona Ward, Shirley Jackson. Non-fiction books tend to be popular science that are ‘popular’ enough I can grasp what they’re on about but ‘science’ enough they’re not just dumbed down crap.

  • Theo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    All non-fiction how to books in print. The only novels I own are on ebook, via PDF on my phone. No number but just a few gigs worth. I can only consume novels in an audio book (narrated via app rather than an audio file). Chump change. Could estimate only about a couple hundred…You need about 5K according to ALA to be a library.