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Your ebook style: hoarder or reader?
November 14, 2010 | 3:22 pm
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By Joanna
I seem to have turned my mother into an ebook hoarder! My parents both got Kobos this year and while Dad seems content to download one or two books at a time and read them in full before heading back to Manybooks.net for more obscure boyhood favourites, Mom it seems is taking after me. I made a joke to her that now that my sister has a Kindle and we can use her California library card to borrow books too, perhaps she should speak to HER out-of-town sister and see about getting us a Vancouver library card number to use. To my surprise, Mom was all over this!
Understand, she still won’t load books onto the reader herself. Last time I took her Kobo for the weekend, I put about 40 books on there. She wants me to do another bulk-load before her upcoming winter in Florida. So I asked her if she’d finished the ones I put on there yet. Well, some of them, she says. And she wants more? Yes, she does. The conversation that followed went something like this:
Me: So, it’s not going to overwhelm you? Having like 100 books on there?
Mom: Well, you never know what you might be in the mood for. I just like having all the choices.
Me: Yeah. I have like 2000 ebooks, and [my sister] was teasing me and she’s like ‘you’ll never read them all.’
Mom: Well, you might. I mean, in your lifetime…
Me: That’s what I said! It’s not like they’re cluttering up my apartment or anything. They don’t take up any space.
Mom: Exactly. You can just have them there, and then you’ll always have something to read, whatever you’re in the mood for.
Me: So how many books do you want? Before Florida?
Mom: Well, how many can you get me?
So, what’s your ebook style? Do you get it, read it and move on? Or do you gleefully download every freebie you can find on the off-chance you find yourself in Florida without any cozy mysteries to read? Are you just in it to read, or is collecting half the fun for you?
Mom is taking after me, and she wasn’t this way about books in paper. I think this is the wonderful, liberating thing about ebooks. It’s no more effort to keep 100 books on the reader than it is to keep a handful. So why not give yourself the choices? You may read them all, you may not. But who cares? You read it, or you don’t. Either way, it’s very little effort.
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I used to keep all the freebies and all purchased but unread books on the kindle. Now I am much more selective about the freebies, and generally do not keep them on the kindle. I am recently much more selective about samples as well — if a book is $9.99 or less, I download the sample and read it between books, or when I just have a few minutes to fill. If it is more than $9.99, I add it to my shoppingnotes.com collection, and don’t even bother with the sample until/unless the price drops. (And note to publishers: most often by then I am no longer interested and don’t purchase the book.) So I am generally in favor of a tidier kindle menu, with 5 pages or fewer of listings at any one time.
I am definitely a hoarder with about 900 books on my Kindle. I do feel like I will read most of them, I’ve read about 150 of them in less than a year.
Your mother is right, I like having a lot to choose from depending on what I’m in the mood to read. I also have a Reader’s Digest subscription for when I only have a few minutes to read. I generally only read one book at a time, with the Reader’s Digest issue ongoing.
I don’t get all freebies, there are many that will never appeal to me.
I don’t read samples, I generally go from the book description. Since I never buy anything over about $6 and usually only $2.99 or less, I feel like there’s little risk in getting a book I don’t like.
So far, out of all of the freebies and indie books I’ve read, there was only one I really didn’t like, only because it was such a dark and depressing book without a satisfactory resolution.
I’ve always been a pretty picky reader, so I usually find a few that look like something I’d enjoy and keep a short queue. Among free books, I usually only read the ‘classics’, since I know they’re at least reputed to be good, even if it turns out I don’t like them. (Most of them I do enjoy, though there are a few that I hated, like Moby Dick.)
So I guess I’d be classified a “reader”.
Definately a horder, but I was that way about p-books too. I had to get a new book by my favorite author as soon as it came out. My theory was it’s not like they were going to spoil just sitting on my bookshelf. And I usually managed to read them before the paperback version caome out. I’m trying to be less of a horder on my Kindle. I download samples of the books that I want instead of putting them on my wish list. That seems to satisfy my need to own the book. Also I usually delete books from my Kindle after I have read them except for a few select books. After all I can always download them again if I wish to reread them.
Hoarder — but on my PC. E-library with books neatly labeled and slotted into categories. Contemporary texts usually science fiction and fantasy. Lots of 19th-century English and American fiction. It’s important to me to have everything by Charlotte Yonge that’s made it into e.
I have about 300 TBR books waiting for me with about 2 dozen or so bookmarked in my browser for either price reductions or ebook availability in my region later.
I have found that I like to have a whole bunch waiting so that I can pick and read whatever strikes my fancy. I find that my reading habits have changed – I often have 5 or 6 books being read at a time from different genres whereas before ebooks, I would generally finish one before starting another book. Furthermore, I am more open to marking a book as DNF (did not finish) if I have books waiting in the TBR collection where again before, I felt more obligated to finish the book just in case the author managed to recover from a poorly written book.
I have lots of e-books on my Kindle I haven’t read, so arguably I am a hoarder. On the other hand I don’t run around taking *everything*; just stuff I think is interesting at the time. If I don’t like it, I delete it.
But I’m with your Mom on this. What does it hurt to have bunches of stuff you can pick through to decide what to read next? It’s not like it takes any space.
I’m already a hoarder with made-from-paper books and it was a behaviour I had hoped to shed with my Kindle. Not so. I already have an alarming 80 unread books, and most of them were not free.
I have 800 plus books that I have already read (and often reread). Then I scan the free books sites and add new ones that interest me. And many of Baen’s books.
This makes the collections feature very important for me. The new, unread stuff can get lost among the mass. Even sorting by date doesn’t always work if I get busy — things can get buried. Now, I make sure and tag it to my unread collection just after I add it.
Joanna, notwithstanding the fact that I teased you about the 2,000 books in your library, I do totally get why you do that, and I have to admit I’m a hoarder too. I have something like 1,800 books in my Calibre library (I’ve been collecting and reading e-books since long before I got my Kindle), and there’s probably stuff in there I won’t ever read (or won’t ever read again).
I do have a question for the hoarders: How many of you keep your whole libraries on your e-reader? Here’s what I do: Of my 1,800 or so books in my collection, I have about 250 or so on the Kindle. Most of these are books I plan to read, or books that someone else in my household may read. I have a collection for each person in my house on my Kindle (“To Read: Tammy”, “To Read: Megan”, etc.) with the books that are actively being read now or that are likely to be read soon. When I finish a book, I take it out of that collection and then either delete it from the device or, if I might want to re-read it soon, move it into a “Completed Books” collection.
What do other people do?
I’ve definitely become a hoarder. I’d estimate I have about 800 ebooks total, and have probably read nearly 200 in the past few years. I also get ebooks from the library that are not part of my personal collection, but are books I have read. I accumulate ebooks much faster than I can read them.
I’m a little bit of both.
I have about 500 books on my iPod Touch, and I think I’ve read about 20 of them…