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I find it very hard to get rid of books. We have hundreds, many of which haven't been read. We're moving soon and don't have the room for 8+ large book cases.

It started with getting rid of duplicates and titles I have on Kindle. Now it is a case of I haven't read that in 10 years I am not going to read it now.... I used to work in a bookshop, which was great but also bad as I used to be tons of books. They were cheap and we got discounts.

Don't worry though I am not throwing them out - all the books are going to the charity shops to be sold on.

It's therapeutic but a bit sad....

I know just how you feel AL. My hubby bought me a kindle years ago to stop books taking over the house and as I could take up to 20 books away with us to cut down on them too. You are right it's so difficult to get rid of any of them at all. I started with novels that I hadn't read,was I ever going to read it ? No we'll pass it on then...... And so it went. It has taken me about 5/6 years to get down to what I have now. I kept all the ones I had had for a life time, I kept all my vet nursing books and natural history books. I only kept my very favourite history books and anything that I was really attached too for various reasons.
It took a long time but we got there in the end, I only have one large bookcase in my study now but I now have my Granddaughters ever growing paperback collection taking up room so I might have to get another small bookcase back after all. ( if I say it quickly it doesn't seem so bad and Roy might not notice)
I think that if you are addicted to books you will always be so.No matter how much I love my kindle, and I do love it, there is still something very special about picking up a new book.
Good Luck !

I'll probably have to do the same thing when I move to the UK. I have packed up and moved a load of books that I really don't want to get rid of, and the rest will have to be disposed of somehow. I'll survive without them. Somehow...

A.L. wrote: "I find it very hard to get rid of books. We have hundreds, many of which haven't been read. We're moving soon and don't have the room for 8+ large book cases.

It started with getting rid of dupli..."

Maybe you could few a few on ebay? The more valuable books?

Been there, done that :( (I wasn't even moving house - the books had just overflowed all the shelving, the occasional tables, the floor, the stairs...)

I too was forced into Kindle ownership by an out of control book habit.

David wrote: "I too was forced into Kindle ownership by an out of control book habit."

How many books a day were you injecting? :)

It started with the The Book People, with one big box. Four moves later we had 15 boxes of books. We have managed to get rid of 10 boxes. Hubby has put up shelves everywhere, then he said no more shelves. Then I got the kindle . Now each of the kids have started their own collections.

I started ripping DVDs to a media server, because there wasn't enough shelf space for them either (don't worry, I kept the discs, just chucked the boxes). I had thought 4TB would be ample, but then along came blu ray and I quickly ran out of space. (the stack of blu rays waiting for me to buy a bigger media server is very worrying!)

4TB? Woah. We're getting a Slice soon and that should be more than enough for our paltry media library!
I've got rid of many, many of my books. I was aware that I was hanging on to many of them with absolutely no likelihood of reading them again. Just kept a few cherished volumes.

What's 4TB? Sounds like the latest robot skynet has dreamed up in the terminator series :)

When I was at my old place I used to buy at least two books a week. The whole flat was full up with books. I had a complete collection of Discworld books and all the Agatha Christie's.
It was really upsetting leaving them all behind. But since having the kindle I have thousands of books again. Not only have I regained a lot of space, my books can't get damp or damaged any more, like they did in my old place. I have less than twenty physical books now and they are all reference books which have illustrations in.

I do have quite a few DVDs but I don't watch them that often. I have 1TB on my Humax Foxsat and I try to erase stuff as soon as I've watched it and only keep a few programmes permanently on it. It's half full at the moment.

Books used to be so valuable but they are so available and cheap now. I had to clean out my mother's house and having to find homes for all those shelves of books was a real chore. We are empty nesters and are trying to save our kids the work so have been purging. The rule now for a book to take up real estate in my house is I have to love it or it has to be worth something.

We charity-shopped a huge amount of books when we moved here about 15 years ago. At the end of last year we did the same again. The ones I'm really attached to are paperbacks from fellow indies. They'll stay!

R.M.F wrote: "David wrote: "I too was forced into Kindle ownership by an out of control book habit."

How many books a day were you injecting? :)"

I thought I could handle it:

I can give it up at any time

I just need a couple of short stories, maybe a novella, to get me through the night, that's all.

Tim wrote: "I started ripping DVDs to a media server, because there wasn't enough shelf space for them either (don't worry, I kept the discs, just chucked the boxes). I had thought 4TB would be ample, but then..."

I chucked my boxes, but filed the discs in 200 CD briefcase wallets (I've filled three now).

I'll have to part with a few more books when Mel moves in after the wedding, but I shifted more than I wanted to last year when I moved flat. There's not many left that I'd still be happy to part with :(

Mine are in those little paper CD envelopes (with the title written on, because often the discs are almost bare, especially if they're double sided. (tiny writing printed around the hub is useless IMHO)

Yes, I might have to adopt a system like that, though most of mine are illustrated to some extent.

Then the paper envelopes are arranged alphabetically in several of those big cardboard boxes with the index card slot on the front. "A-J", "K-P", "Q-Z"

It might be a generational thing. Apart from the very rich, most households didn't start collecting books in any numbers until Penguin began selling cheap paperbacks in the 1930s.

And most people didn't start collecting records until the LP's heyday from the 1950s.

We started collecting VHS tapes in the 1980s after the bitter VHS-Betamax war that my Dad got wrong.

We have been collecting CDs since 1980. DVDs from around 1999. Itunes from 2000. Blu rays from around 2006.

So while we might think that music and book collections have always been with us, in fact we've only been doing it for a few decades.

The next generation don't seem so interesting in physical collections, if my 14 year son is anything to go by. He has a small number of books, CDs and DVDs but on the whole his world is digital.

Future historians will probably look back at us and laugh at this brief period in history when we filled our houses with collections of physical books, films and music.

But, yes, I do hate giving books away.

Humans are naturally collectors - it's part of our hunter/gatherer upbringing, and consequently in our genes (or is that jeans...)

Your 14 y.o. may not have a physical collection (give him time...) but he's definitely still collecting!

I should consider giving some away seeing as there are that many I want to read that the chances of re-reading are very slim, and some have been replaced by kindle versions, but I can't seem to bring myself to do it. I am trying very hard not to keep any of the ones I haven't read yet

I rarely keep books that I have read. I have a few favourites and some childhood books with special memories. Other than that, I either pass them on or throw them out as soon as I have read them as I can't stand clutter. My husband on the other hand...

Tim - humans as natural collectors? I am not so sure. If you look at the 7 billion people on this planet or the 6,000 - 10,000 (ish) years of civilization, then we haven't actually done much collecting of anything.

If anything, collecting seems to be something that only the relatively rich do. After you have acquired all the goods that you need, you then start collecting things that you don't need.

My prediction is that household collections of paper books will one day seem as quaint and old fashioned as our great grandparents collecting sheet music to play on the family piano.

Trainspotting... it's collecting. Plane spotting... it's collecting. we collect recipes, seeds, ornaments, videos, books, games, CDs, MP3s, stamps, postcards, newspapers, plastic bags, bookmarks, magazines, parking tickets, old tax discs, photographs, beer mats, old TV licences, plants, fossils, rocks, seashells, garden gnomes... if it exists, we collect it.

Just look around you - I guarantee you won't find anyone who doesn't collect something.

I'd have to agree with Tim.

I can't think of any culture that hasn't/doesn't accumulate beyond their needs.

Richer people just collect more expensive stuff - cars, boats, planes, villas, tactical missiles, wine, bigger money, divorces...

Me, I collect maps. I collect post-its around my screen like they're going out of style. I have a small collection of American-style belt buckles (although no belts to fit them), a massive collection of old 2000AD comics going back to the 1990s. The one thing I can't seem to collect is portraits of the Queen...

I'll paint you one Tim. It will probably look nothing like her, but i can write some big numbers on it if that would help.

Could you drop it off at the nearest Barclays and tell them to add it to my collection? They're normally pretty obliging. I'm told you can even take in a big portrait and swap it for a series of vignettes...