"I am hoarding books for retirement."

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

I think it's just an excuse for hoarding. There's a continuum between collecting books and hoarding, and my suspicion is that those of us who are on the hoarding side of that continuum know that we're buying more books now than we can read in a year or more, but figure that when we retire, we'll have a lot more time to catch up on that reading.

That's me totally.

[Josieb1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I currently have about 4500 books in my Calibre library, of which over 3000 are unread. Am I likely to be able to read them all? No. Do I care? No. Buying and collecting them is half the fun .

I feel so much better now. I love buying books, I'm always on the look out for that 'perfect' read. I have about 2000.

I will retire in no more than 9 years, and I will get a pension, and I have no intention of ever working again. Reading will be my work. If I can get out of work before I will.

[Victoria]

I have approx 1000 unread ebooks, and suspect the truth for me is a combo of all the above. I enjoy collecting too; hate to pass up a deal on a good book; mixed with 'the grass will be greener' when I retire and have lots of reading time. But as Charles says, we shouldn't count on tomorrow. Luckily, the hoarding part is fun right now

Plus - you never have to dust ebooks.

[Tarana]

I'm an ebook hoarder. That is why I'm on the Ebook addicts list. That is all I will say on the subject.

[pwalker8]

I do have a pretty big "to be read" stack, but I don't expect funds to buy ebooks to be an issue when I retire. I suspect that some of my buying habits is more based on the fact that paperbacks go out of print, so I've gotten in the habit of buying any book that I might be interested in, on the spot since I may not be able to find it later.

[Greg Anos]

I don't know if I would be considered a hoarder.

I like my library to be portable. I would like my whole library to be portable, but there are a couple hundred books that aren't available as e-book. Same thing for my music library. I get a personal comfort level of having a copy of everything off-site (in a safety deposit box), and a "go bag" with a Sansa clip music player and an e-book reader.

That way, if a friend knocked on the door, and said "I've got an extra ticket to Bora Bora this evening, want to go?", (I should live so long...) i can just grab the bag and go.

[xg4bx]

I'm not hoarding for retirement, I'm simply hoarding. And I find myself getting increasingly annoyed as I look at my cluttered, dusty shelves full of things I'll never read or re-read.

Overall I'm finding myself questioning my need for any physical media, especially relatively inexpensive things like books and movies.

[frahse]

Originally Posted by 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?

===

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.

There is an expression that is used too much, but still here it is:

"You think too much."

[crich70]

I also have collected a good number of ebooks. Some here at MR and others at places like Amazon and Smashwords. I don't know if I will ever manage to read them all but as HarryT said half the fun is in having them in my collection so that if I want something to read that I've not done before I have it available. And most of my books are from free deals at Amazon or from the summer/winter sale at Smashwords where I got them free so it isn't necessary to spend a lot of $ to build a large library of ebooks. Some I bought though they weren't free but the majority were such deals. That's one of the perks of e-readers. You can (if wise and/or lucky) find a good many books that cost you nothing. In that way all my e-readers have paid for themselves many times over.

[Fluribus]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

That way, if a friend knocked on the door, and said "I've got an extra ticket to Bora Bora this evening, want to go?", (I should live so long...) i can just grab the bag and go.

That's why I keep a heavy stick next to the door. I can just grab it and bash some sense into the poor fool.

I hoard e-books to expand my possibilities. I'd hoard women, but I'm too slow to catch them.

[Canuck_in_Japan]

Call me crazy but if you're hoarding ebooks for retirement then wouldn't it be smarter to take that money and invest it and then when you retire buy all the books you want with the money you've saved and interest earned? As far as I know, ebooks sitting on your hard drive don't accumulate any interest.

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Fluribus

I hoard e-books to expand my possibilities. I'd hoard women, but I'm too slow to catch them.

....ew.

Is it necessary to inject random sexual violence jokes into otherwise pleasant conversations about ebooks? I, for one, could do without it.

If people could bear in mind that this isn't a locker room, that would be great. Cheers.

[meeera]

And in answer to the question itself: I don't hoard ebooks (in my dialect that does have strongly negative connotations also), but I'll cop to a certain amount of stockpiling. I've done a reasonable amount of paper book culling in recent years, but children's/YA books are still flowing in on account of having a middle-grade-aged child who isn't completely converted to ebooks yet. Cookbooks are accumulating, too, but I'm good with that.

[mva1985]

Originally Posted by crich70

You see the unhealthy sort of hoarding all the time in the news where people have over 100 dogs and cats etc. or some such.

lol.... at least my ebooks aren't leaving a nasty smell behind :-)

[arturg]

I have still a LOT of years until my retirement, but in a way I am collecting good books for later times. I tend to follow up on some deals as most ebooks here in Finland can cost up to 25 euros but this one place I purchase books from have deals from time to time to get book for as low as 5 euros. This is when I tend to purchase them for later times.