Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Yes, those 99ps (or 99¢s) add up over time, in addition to adding to the clutter of "books I most likely will never get to." Unfortunately, it's much easier to justify ten books for 99¢ (and that's pretty much risen to $1.99) than it is to justify one book for $10, or $20 (which isn't happening), but I'd be so much more likely to get the value from the pricey book!
One reason I'm quoting this is because I have an ancillary dilemma. Long ago, I cleared the deadwood freebies out of my Amazon account. However, where I'm stuck is in getting rid of those aforementioned 99¢ "bargains." Many of them I'll equally never read and they're equally a distraction, but somehow having paid for them gives them a gloss and there they sit.
And yes, I'll anticipate the response: I know virtual books take up no real space, etc. But there are the same reasons to get rid of the paid for junk as there are to get rid of the free junk. Sunk costs, or to put it bluntly, money wasted, is no justification for retention.
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I encountered this a few years ago. I had just finished reading Marie Kondo's
The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, and my wife and I agreed that we needed to downsize some. Mind you, I am not a Kondo disciple, as there are a lot of issues of privilege tied up in the notion of being able to throw out/donate bags of stuff, but I appreciate the notion.
So, we went through every book on every one of our eight 6-foot shelves and decided what to keep. Easy enough. But I am the only one with an ebook library. So I put Calibre into cover view and tried to do the same. I build a TBR every January, and if I couldn't see that book hitting that list anytime soon, it was time for it to go.
As an alternative, you can create a folder of those books elsewhere on your PC and just remove them from Calibre. If, in 6-12 months, you have had no need to go looking for something to read out of that folder, delete it and be done.