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Reading and acquiring habits change over a lifetime anyway. When I was young and hard-up, I read as much as possible from libraries and haunted second-hand bookshops for out-of-print books. So the first books I bought were either new paperbacks or Victorian hardbacks.
As my career progressed I bought more new books but still borrowed a lot from libraries. For the past 26 years I have lived in non-English-speaking countries and my book-acquiring habits changed again: not much browsing in shops, avid reading of reviews, mail-order book-buying.
When Amazon started up, I mainly switched to the internet to buy new books. I still visited bookshops when in England, and I also found myself buying paperbacks from airport bookshops when I was travelling.
I don't keep all the books I buy. A lot of the airport ones go to charity. When we moved house in 2009 I had a big clearout and gave away 100s of books to a school for money-raising sales. But I still have thousands of books and I have a large backlog of unread books that I am gradually working my way through. I decided that when I hit 70 I had to think about downsizing a bit and that would involve getting rid of a lot of books that I might hang on to for nostalgic reasons but will probably never read again. So I am planning to shift a large number of my dtbooks when I get round to it.
I decided that an ereader would be a practical solution for me. Buying an ebook instead of a dt equivalent saves me small amounts of money because it saves on shelf space. (Publishers aren't the only ones who incur costs from storing books.) So far I have acquired quite a lot of free or very cheap classics, almost all of them books I already own in dt format. When I want a new book, I look first to see if it's available in eformat. If not, I probably won't buy it at all, unless it's a must-have reference book. I value the ereader for travelling. I can make sure that I have a sufficient variety of books loaded to keep me occupied in all moods.
I would buy a lot more books if more were available in eformat and if it weren't for the ridiculous geographic restrictions. I try hard to refrain from buying dtbooks.
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