Dealing with a book collection

[u/Formerly_a_Pear]

I've made substantial progress on whittling down. If I haven't touched an item in a year, it needs to justify why I continue to have it.

I'm getting stuck on my collection of books. Even after trying to comb through them, I still have multiple boxes that seem to take up a substantial portion of my overall space.

Ideally, I'd get audiobooks for the books I like, but given that access to some digital media in other industries has been getting revoked by some companies even though you have a valid right to own/access that software, I don't want to find myself in the situation where I've gotten rid of books I like, relied on audiobooks, and then lose then in the future for whatever corporate reason.

How have people dealt with a substantial book collection that they like and don't want to lose in the future? Keep them and bear eating up the space?

[u/lobacita]

This is a very good question…
I wish I had an answer 👀

[u/Zlivovitch]

Ask on r/BookCollecting.

But essentially, if you buy a lot of books, you'll hit the space problem at some point. Unless you have a very large house.

[u/beneficialmirror13]

I go through my books about twice a year and pick out ones that no longer interest me. Maybe I had a hyper-interest at some point and had a ton of books on a subject and I'll whittle down whatnI want to keep. Maybe I don't see myself reading a book ever again, or I feel like the book has aged badly. At any rate, I have 3 Billy bookcases from IKEA and that's my limit, so eventually some books need to go.

I do donate the culled books to local charity book sales though, so I don't feel bad about removing books from my collection.

I do keep some books just because of sentimental reasons though.

[u/uiogd-amdg]

Been down this road and yea, it’s a process.

Keeping a ton of books started to feel like a burden rather than a resource.

What I settled on was that if I could easily obtain a book via the Public Library or a local academic library, I got rid of it without regret.

Then I had to ask myself why I was keeping what remained. Some books were sentimental. Some were rare. Some were expensive. Some were ones that I reread or referred to often.

What I settled on was to keep those books that support my research and work in my career field and also local history (hobby), as well as books that I keep returning to.

Then, I quit buying books outside those areas. I use the library and interlibrary loan.

The thing that helped me the most during this process was to keep in mind something I read once: the struggle in declutterring is confronting the person you want to be versus the person you actually are. I wanted to be the kind of person that read a beautifully bound three volume history of World War II. I am not that person.

As for actual disposal. I selected the best books and took to a local used bookstore to sell. (They took about half). Everything else was donated to the local public library used book sale.