[Katsunami]

This is a sentence I see regularly, mostly in conjunction with "I expect my income to be less."

At this point in time, I have an ebook "hoard" that will last me for about 10 years to come, should I keep reading at my current pace (and, assuming that I don't read every single letter in my Delphi Classics). However, my retirement is another 30 years away at the very LEAST. Taking the current life expectancy of males into account (in The Netherlands), I can expect live another 45 years, starting today.

Let's say, I keep my current pace of ~50 books a year during my working life, and I'll work another 30 years. Also, let's assume I'll double the amount of books when retired, and that I'll live to exactly my expected life span.

That would mean that I need to hoard 30 years * 50 books + 15 years * 100 books = 3,000 books, and I'm not even taking some future books into account I might want to read. Hell, I can't even imagine 3,000 books in one place apart from a library, let alone pick 3,000 NOW that I'd want to read.

I wonder: Is hoarding for retirement useful (especially in the case of ebooks)?

If you're 63 and retiring in two years, expecting your income to drop significantly, I can imagine that you hoard as much books as you can. I also expect you to be able to read all of them, as I think the current formats will be readable at least for another 20 years.

I, however, would need to take into account that I might not actually be able to read the books I buy now, in another 40 years. It may be impossible or difficult to read the AZW3 or EPUB format. Yes, converting is possible, if DRM is removed, but a book might go through multiple conversions in 40 years, which may cause problems down the road. At this point in time, the future of current-day ebooks is therefore uncertain.

So, do you hoard books for your retirement?

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The books I actively hoard are the Forgotten Realms ones. I do so because there are over 300 of them, and I get as many as I can at each sale. Another hoard is comprised of the books of the series I definitely want to read and have been on my TBR for a long time, but I never got them in paper: I now get them when on sale, often an entire series at once.

I also dumped 3500 well-formatted public domain books from a site I ran across once, just because I could. And yes, these books where free, but intended to download one-by-one, and the Delphi Classics, each containing many stories and books can also be seen as a hoard.

Therefore I ticked that I don't hoard for retirement, but do hoard anyway. Fortunately, my current hoard is easily within the limits of what I can realistically read in the rest of my life.

PS: I wouldn't be hoarding any books if I was reading on paper only.