Over the past two years I’ve decimated my library. This 90% reduction has come about by mostly getting rid of all fiction books, which made sense when I realized I rarely reread fiction. So I’ve gone from 1000s of books to 100s, and the hundreds are mostly reference books, because I revisit art,design, craft etc books especially since you can dive in and out.

I also have an ever growing collection of self development/lifestyle books, but I tend to cull those fairly often once I feel I’ve gotten everything I’m going to get out of them.

If I can stop buying boxes of remaindered books from online sites and just borrow books from libraries I’d eventually have even more empty shelf space. However the selection in rural libraries can be quite broad, which is a problem for those of us with niche interests.

From the $65au box of books that arrived this morning I will keep less than half. Some will get read and given away, some will get half read and given away, a few will get abandoned in coffeeshops. A few will end up in my reference shelves, and some will end up repurposed, because I have books about that too.

*note: When I said decimated I meant the modern term not the roman version. If you want to be pedantic I guess it was me keeping one in every ten books so an anti-decimation?