A scary statistic

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A scary statistic

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6th Mar, 2014 at 3:47 PM

The average British household has 138 volumes on its shelves, less than half of which have been read

I think that's the size of the stack of 'read then chuck back in the charity box' stack by my bed. This is apart from the 'read and keep stack' across the room (5 of the large cloth bags with stick handles + 3 folding crates).

Current Mood: shocked

( 11 comments — Leave a comment )

eoforyth

6th Mar, 2014 16:07 (UTC)

I heard about this on the radio this morning when I was half awake, and thought at first they'd said the average household had an average of 138 books still to be read, which wasn't too far from the count here TBH.

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were_gopher

6th Mar, 2014 20:21 (UTC)

I'm not going to count the number of unread books in this house. Just take a guess from average buy per year including conventions = 150, average read me 80 - 100 him 40 - 60. subtract the detectives from the library (20?) and smooth my horror vs his mil SF and you still end up with a substantial surplus.

I have decided I cannot die until I have run out of unread books so at this rate, if the buy vs read curve holds, I should be good for another century.

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hrrunka

6th Mar, 2014 16:17 (UTC)

Someone has to skew the figures to balance out all those houses with fewer than 10 books... ;)

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were_gopher

6th Mar, 2014 20:22 (UTC)

Yes, well, you've seen my librarything,(must get the non SF in there).

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aunty_marion

6th Mar, 2014 22:18 (UTC)

As I remarked to Tiggy on FB, if you doubled that figure and added a nought on the end, you'd probably be somewhere in the region of half my books. Just my main SF collection is five shelves, EACH with about that many on it! I should think the auxiliary over-the-sofa set is at least twice 138, then there's the non-fiction and various oddments. And that's just the living room. Oh, and the large supermarket heavy-duty carrier with the extra Anne McCaffrey and other not-much-read books, which lurks under the knitting yarn behind the TV.

I can't be arsed to go into the bedroom and do a random count there.

There are probably at least half a dozen unread ones - acquired from odd places and by various means, some of which may or may not get read eventually.

And then there's the e-book collection, which has started well since I acquired the tablet in January...

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were_gopher

7th Mar, 2014 10:37 (UTC)

My SF/F/H library currently stands at 5475 books though himself thinks there may be more of his Mothers collection still in storage waiting to be fed in.

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/Murphyslawyer

That is the catalogued stuff.

As for the shoulder high double stacked bookcase with the detective and spy collection, the chest high classics one (ignore the bulldog drummonds on the bottom shelf), the three similar sized of coffeetable movie reference and kids annuals, the head high partly double stacked graphic novels one, the similar sized reference section, ditto biography & misc, and the bookcase that came from my Mums childhood bedroom that has the esoterica, regular size movie reference and various other waifs and strays... I think I need to get busy with the laptop.

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aunty_marion

7th Mar, 2014 11:34 (UTC)

My count would be considerably higher if I'd been buying books over the past seven years, which I haven't. I've had a few from Lulu (by friends) and a couple of second-hand ones from charity shops, and TWO! NEW!! ONES!!! from Forbidden Planet - Robin McKinley's latest two, because she had a signing. Forbidden Planet (and other bookshops...) became Planet Forbidden after I was made redundant.

I've given up cataloguing apart from the SF books, which mysteriously look a lot fewer in the catalogue than I can count on the shelves.

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were_gopher

7th Mar, 2014 15:18 (UTC)

Most of my buying is the secondhand stalls in the dealers room (Brian knows me all too well). There are very few 'must buy new' writers or series these days.

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jaxomsride

6th Mar, 2014 23:46 (UTC)

That is a very sad statistic. What is the point of buying a book and then not reading it. I must admit my purchase of actual physical books has gone down since getting my Kindle, But at the last count you'd have to add a nought to that figure.

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inamac

7th Mar, 2014 09:38 (UTC)

I have lots of books I don't 'read' - mostly reference works- so if they're including dictionaries and encyclopedias in the 'unread' statitsics (and I suspect they are) it's not surprising that they're 'uread'.

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aunty_marion

7th Mar, 2014 11:30 (UTC)

Dictionaries - both languages (French, German, Latin, Welsh, Japanese as well as English) and things like thesauruses, dictionaries of quotations, etc; encyclopaedias - health, gardening, home maintenance, birds, etc; atlases, and other maps; books of collections of poetry, Collected Shakespeare, G&S... And then there's the FICTIONAL equivalents! Klingon dictionary, Star Fleet Manuals/Star Atlases ... I could go on. Yes, many of them partially or occasionally mostly 'read', but certainly not all of them.

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( 11 comments — Leave a comment )

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