Book buying stats for 2014

I buy a lot of books for my Kindle. I mostly use gift card money and wait until the books I want go on sale. But it always seems like I’m buying more books than I can read and my TBR pile just keeps growing and growing.

I decided to run the numbers for 2014 to see exactly how many books I bought, how many I read, and how much I spent. Here’s what I found…

I bought 56 books for Kindle in 2014, and spent an average of $4.66 per book. Note: This doesn’t count books I bought as gifts… only books I bought for me and/or my husband on my account.

I read 27 of the 56 books I bought this year. Of the remaining 29 books: 4 were purchased for my husband to read (so they don’t really count), and 3 were purchased for future reading (a pre-order, a re-read, and a book for my book project).

That leaves only 22 unread books. And the average price of just those 22 unread books is only $3.58 — less than the overall average purchase price. Not bad.

Feeling relatively confident about my book buying habits, but still confused about why I have all these unread books on my Kindle, I decided to peek back to 2013. From there I dug up another 19 books I’d purchased but hadn’t read yet. Luckily, only 6 of those were purchased at full price.

I don’t mind leaving sale-purchased books unread, but it is pretty annoying to have full price books sitting around unread. So, I’m adjusting my reading list for 2015 to fix that problem. I’ve made a list of books I’ve purchased at full price for my Kindle, but haven’t read yet. My plan is that I am going to make an effort to read through most, if not all, of this list before I buy any more books. I will make exceptions to this rule for buying books for my 2015 reading project.

Here’s the resulting TBR list of combined 2013 and 2014 unread books:

Wolf Hall: A Novel by Hilary Mantel
On the Steel Breeze (Poseidon’s Children Book 2) by Alastair Reynolds
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
Fortune’s Pawn (Paradox Book 1) by Rachel Bach
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition) by Betty Friedan, Gail Collins, Anna Quindlen
Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke and Bone Trilogy Book 3) by Laini Taylor
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman
Hild: A Novel by Nicola Griffith

Overall, running the numbers made me feel a bit better about my book buying habits. I’m okay with paying an average of $5 per book, and I’m relieved that I’ve read at least half of the books I’ve been buying. I may have a long TBR list, but they’re all still books I still really want to read.