How many books do you own?

Got six books from the 17th century

I'm like aidan. I'm more of a library gal. I don't read books over again, or watch a movie twice, so there's no sense in having books you don't absolutely love around

Wally is the book buyer - from places like Half Price Books, Goodwill, yard sales, etc.

We both love Stephen King, and like kicky have the hardcovers of all of his.

We've probably got 200-300 in the house. After reading, Wally gives a lot of his books to friends who love to read too. I'd say half of the permanent collection are books that have a special meaning to one of us, the other half are just there.

I'll go through cycles were I get all my reading from the library, then I'll read some of the ones Wally's bought.

We do the library too -- we go every couple of weeks and get a bagful for sozlet.

I usually get my book club books at the library since they aren't ones I necessarily want to hold on to, but I absolutely LOVE recalling a certain passage, going crazy trying to remember it, then walking right up to the book, paging through and finding the passage. One of life's great pleasures (I'm not saying I'm not weird).

I do also re-read whole books when enough time has passed. I'm thinking I might be coming up on being able to re-read "A Suitable Boy" for the third time. Such a great book.

And sozlet runs out of her bagful of library books at inopportune times (like when she's sick and we can't go anywhere) and it's been so great to just dig in to our own library. I've kept a lot of books specifically for her (she just finished "A Wrinkle in Time") and she's enjoyed a lot of books that we got for ourselves (like Douglas Adams' "Last Chance to See").

A lot of the books are gifts -- it's one of the most sure-fire presents for me. The latest Jhumpa Lahiri, whatever. I have probably ten "favorite" authors at any one time and one of 'em usually has a "latest" at holiday/ birthday time.

add about another 300+ audio books to my total, really cuts down on the storage space

After reading all the posts so far, I really do feel alone. I'm the only one who doesn't have a heckuva lot of books. Quantum physics? Hmmm, I don't think that would hold my interest, Edgar.

Love audio books more and more as my eye sight go farther and farther down hill. Beside you can be on a treadmill, cycling, walking or driving and enjoy them at the same time.

There was time that I had been reading a book and only luck kept me from being run over by a truck as had happen to author S. King. I love the fact that he then completely placed the blame for the mishap on the redneck driver not on himself for walking along a roadway with his nose in a book.

Please do not tell anyone but sometime I do not even check out an audio book from the library instead I rip the CDs with my laptop right there and place it on my mp3 player.

Love my old mp3 player with two thousand songs and fifty podcasts and maybe ten books on it at any one time.

Try Hawking books on the subject of space time you might find them interesting.

i first got hooked on audio books through the harry potter series, started reading them but wasn't getting into them, got the first three on audio, read by british actor author stephen fry, wonderful

the right narrator makes all the difference, got straub and kings books the talisman and black house, loved the stories, but the narrator was horrible, took me ages to finally listen to the whole thing, luckily bad narrators are rare

Oh before I forget the web site librivox.org contain a large collection of free public domain books for the downloading.

Hmm, no thanks.

I can't remember the last time I read a book from cover to cover. I'm not an ignorant person, and I don't hate reading. It's just that there's other stuff I would prefer to do in my spare time. Now that I'm back to playing internet chess, there's not a lot of time for other things.

I do most of my reading on the internet. I do read local papers, but that's about it.

From my high school/college days of chess playing I remember reading a lot of books on the subject.

Frankly I do not know how you can become even a fairly good chess player without reading books on the opening and closing game ETC.

Reyn,

We need to start up the a2k chess league again sometime.

I don't have many books, owing to having to give them all up every time I move. Today my girlfriend took down all my books off my shelf, getting them ready to give away as we are paring down our stuff in anticipation of moving out of Costa Rica. :-(

I'm probably going to move to a digital collection soon. I've always resisted doing that with books, and hoped to one day consolidate my hard copy book collection. But my brother and I left boxes and boxes of books in Brazil with family and we never did get to retrieve them. Then I stored books for a year in San Diego when I moved to Costa Rica and had to give them away again, and here I am now losing my books yet again here in Costa Rica.

I always wanted to one day settle down and put all my books from all over the place into nice shelves, but now I think I'll just go for a Kindle or something. I'll never be able to haul them all around, and I still don't know when I'll stay somewhere long enough to keep a collection and I could keep thousands of books on a tiny flash chip if I just buckle down and go digital.

You know what is somewhat frightening is if something very bad happen to us in the future to the point it destroy our high technology there shortly will be no written knowledge to fall back on to be a seed in rebuilding.

Maybe we should consider doing what we had done for our plants seeds and build a vault somewhere containing books in a very protected long lasting environment.

If you understand technology it's not frightening, it's silly.

I own more books than all of you, and that's all that matters.

I'm brilliant, is what I'm getting at.

there must be a few hundred books in the house - far too many !!!
for the last 40 years i've promised myself to make an inventory of them ...
actually might start next year ... writing it down for new year's resolution ...
scribble - scribble - scribble ... ...
i have to admit , it's probably my fault that ehbeth has so many books
hbg

Okay, next question: How many books have you read? All-time total.

I bet I've read at least a million books. Or whatever Gargamel says +1.

I culled my library last year. I gave away the dictionary and any reference books with information that is easy to look up on-line. I kept all the fancy pictures books about gardens and art, although Google Image is a wonderful thing. I sold a bunch of of signed first editions and redid my bathroom with the profits. I still own a few hundred books, some of them are just novels that are piled in baskets waiting to be read, but others that are on the bookshelves have sentimental value or are out of print oddities. I have a nice little collection of cookbooks printed before 1930 and a couple hand-colored botanical tomes from the 18th century. I still get a sort of high walking into a good book shop or library sale, but it's not as intense as it was before the internet came into my life.