For the past few years I’ve been trying to eat through my backlog of ebooks that I’ve purchased on sale but haven’t read yet. I’ve also been trying, and failing, to stop buying new ebooks, especially when I don’t plan to read them right away.
The good news is, even though the year isn’t over yet, I may have *finally* put the brakes on my book buying. And buy “put the brakes on” I basically mean I purchased half the number of books I normally purchase. For the past few years, I’ve purchased between 60 and 70 ebooks each year. But, this year, I only purchased about 35. That’s progress.
For the most part, I succeeded in only buying new releases that I really wanted to read immediately. But, there were definitely more than a few on sale ebooks that I couldn’t resist, the most recent of which was Jade City which sounds amazing and is on sale for $2.99 as of this posting.
Because more of my book purchases were pre-orders this year vs. on sale ebooks, my average cost per book increased from less than $4 per book, to about $4.5o per book. Not a huge increase, but noticeable. Still, overall I spent about $100 less on ebooks than I have in previous years. Again, a notable improvement.
Now comes the big question, why bother tracking my book buying habits, and why bother trying to spend less on books? Well…buying on sale ebooks (usually backlist) makes almost zero sense when my library ebook selection has improved so much in the past few years.
If I want to avoid long hold lists, fine. But, if I just want to read the ebook sometime in the future, it’s way more sensible to let my library inventory that book for me, especially if it’s a backlist title that they already have. Plus, they now allow me to recommend purchases. They don’t always purchase what I want, but they’ve definitely listened to a lot of my recommendations this year.
The other part of why I decided to keep track my book buying was my desire to keep track of books I purchased at full price but never read. Which makes very little sense unless I truly love making myself feel terrible.
At this point, the portion of my purchases bought at full price but not read yet represents 13 books at a total of just over $100. That’s not a small amount of money. But, as of the New Year, I’m officially absolving myself of all guilt over these unread books.
Guilt is a terrible motivator. No. Scratch that, it’s actually a pretty reliable motivator for me, but it sucks all the joy out of reading. And, since reading is a thing I do for fun, a hobby, I’m done with guilt. I know I’ll read these eventually. But, next year I’m officially retiring my “guilt list” TBR. In fact, I’m seriously considering killing the entire concept of a TBR for my 2018 reading. Stay tuned for more on that in a future post…
Until then, happy (guilt free) reading!
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