If you s/Amazon.com/public library/, that is fairly typical of people who read a lot. There is a LiveJournal community called 50bookchallenge that encourages people to read 50 books a year, keep track of them, and share what they're reading with others. It has 7000+ members. My reading lists for 2003-2006:
(The part I can't imagine is spending so much money on books when the library is perfectly adequate, but I imagine that's not so much of a concern for PB.)
The money isn't my primary problem with buying so many books, though it is a factor...it's the weight of having all those books. When I moved from Austin I sold 26 boxes of books and several bookshelves. I promised myself I would never collect that many books again. I'm moving into an RV this week, and so had to sell all the remaining books (and any that I'd collected since that last move), and I sold 8 boxes of books and three book shelves.
Having large piles of things, like books, makes it too easy to slip into a rut and stay in the same place doing the same thing out of mere inertia (more mass==more inertia, and books en masse are heavy).
"Having large piles of things, like books, makes it too easy to slip into a rut and stay in the same place doing the same thing out of mere inertia (more mass==more inertia, and books en masse are heavy)."
This is excellent insight and something most people don't consider until they have to move for the first time after a few years in the real world and suddenly their possessions which used to fit in the back of a SUV in their college days now require a small truck to move.
The problem is also compounded if you are the kind of person that feels bad about throwing away perfectly good books etc... out.
Tell me about it:-( I've shipped mine across the Atlantic several times, and it's not cheap. I think when e-books hit the sweet spot for even technical things, I'll probably get one and sell off the real books, even though it would hurt to do that, as I really love books.
A friend bought me a Kindle for Christmas. I still have issues with the non-sharable nature of Kindle books, but the convenience factor so dramatically outweighs everything else that I'm willing to live with the negatives. It basically comes down to ebooks or no books (or very few), since my living space is becoming so much smaller.
I donated a bunch of books to the library, as well, but that was problematic...I don't have a car, so hauling boxes worth of books to the library on my bike one backpack full at a time was time-consuming.
If I'd thought to donate them immediately after reading them (as though I were simply returning checked out books), it would have worked better. But I never trained myself to think that way about books I bought. But, the library here in Mountain View is extremely good; it was very rare that I wanted a book that they didn't have, though sometimes I had to wait a week or two for a copy to show up.
Postage can get rather hefty for some of those books. (Though I admit I did this with some of my textbooks in college...I'd register for the course, buy the textbook, read the whole textbook in the first week, return the textbook for a full refund, and then drop the course and take something else.)
2003: http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/24851.html
2004: http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/60579.html
2005: http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/83785.html
2006: http://nostrademons.livejournal.com/105646.html
(The part I can't imagine is spending so much money on books when the library is perfectly adequate, but I imagine that's not so much of a concern for PB.)