The Story So Far…
I’m going to put this right on Front Street – I LOVE books.
This is not a new development. I’ve always loved books from the time I was a small child. In fact, from the time I was eight years old, my parents started putting books in my stocking at Christmas. The rule was that when I awoke, I could come out of my room, grab my stocking, then go back in my room and open whatever was inside. (This was intended to curb the normal childhood desire to open Christmas gifts at six in the morning.) I would become so engrossed in whatever book was in there that they would often have to come drag me back out to open the rest of my gifts.
The kids I grew up with saved up their allowance to purchase something big like a new bike, or fancy basketball shoes. Not me. My first sizable purchase was a new bookcase – a bookcase I still own!
As a young adult, I wound up with some disposable income and my book buying accelerated. The bookstore where I grew up was a small chain called Lauriat’s, and I made a weekly pilgrimage to check out new releases and peruse the sales.
This behavior continued until I moved for the third time in two years and realized three truths:
- I owned a LOT of books.
- I owned a lot of books I was never going to re-read.
- Books are HEAVY.
So I decided to part with a lot of my books. It wasn’t easy at the time, but in retrospect it was a relatively painless process. I can only name some of the books that I parted with, and don’t really miss any of them. For the most part.
It was about this time that I discovered the joy that is the digital book. It was the best of both worlds – I could have all of the books I wanted and they would take up ZERO SPACE. If I had to move? No problem! Traveling with a book? How about traveling with ALL the books! It was awesome.
Now that I’ve given you a lot of history you didn’t ask for, let me tell you why we are here.
Last week I had a discussion with my wife about getting a Kindle Unlimited subscription. This would allow me to download and read all sorts of books for $9.99 per month. Now I had looked into this before and decided that I wouldn’t really get enough use out of it, mainly because of the selection.
As we discussed the pros and cons of this subscription, working out the number of books I would have to read to make it worthwhile, my wife asked me a question:
“How many unread books do you have on your Kindle?”
…
…
Um……excuse me?
This, dear reader, was not a question I wanted to answer.
You see, every morning there are two emails that I look forward to opening: one is from Amazon with my Kindle Daily Deals, and the other contains my daily deals from BookBub. I look forward to these emails for one reason: cheap digital books.
As a result, I’ve amassed quite the collection of digital books. Several years worth of “oh, I’ll try that for ninety-nine cents” has led to a rather…significant backlog. To the tune of 171 unread books.
“Maybe you should read the books you OWN before you buy more books?”
I love my wife, but she was being unreasonable! Sales, people! Two-for-one deals! Spend $20 and get a $5 credit! I’ll get through the backlog someday and I can’t keep missing out on these sweet, sweet, deals. Right?
Right?
Or…I mean…I hate to say it…but maybe she has a point? 171 books is a LOT.
My wife might be right. I own too many unread books.
So I’m going to fix that. I’ve set myself some rules and I will get that backlog worked down. After all…who knows when that next sale is going to come along?