Peter2 wrote: quote="israelsmith" quote="Peter2" To my slight regret, I usually buy e-books now, although I avoid Amazon whenever possible. I prefer hard-copy, but I urgently need to reduce the number of actual books in the house, having moved from a big house to a considerably smaller one. I don't have a precise count on the number of books in the house, but I estimate it's now down to roughly 2000.
I'm slowly replacing my hard copies by e-books, but it's a costly process, and a goodly number don't have e-versions. Also, it's infuriating when just one book in a series is not available in electronic format!
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Are you sure it's about 2000 books? Because that's actually a staggering amount. I used to think for years I had thousands of books, and then I actually took the time to count them all, and it turned out I only had about 1100. /quote
Yes, I'm sure. I have just over 140 ft. of book shelving, of which about 5 ft is empty. I started collecting books (paperbacks – I couldn't afford hard-backs) in 1964, when your average novel contained 180–250 pages, and was roughly ½" thick. Book thickness started to rise in the late 1970's to early 1980's (Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty (published in pb in 1982) is just over ¾" thick. Present-day ones are up to 2" thick, but as I say, I get e-versions now and I don't have all that many modern pb's. Call the average thickness ¾". So I make that 135 x 12 x 1.333 = 2160 books – not allowing for the ones stuffed away in cupboards or piled on top of bookcases . . .
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You mean you don't double stack them nor fill the space between the tops of the books and the next shelf up with books (assuming there is room)? tut tut
