I’m a book-buying addict, I’ve always been. I tend to buy more books than I will probably ever read and yet what happened in 2013 went far beyond my normal standards of crazy. I’ve never bought so many books in the course of one year before and I’m not even sure why I went over the top.
That’s a quote from my 2013 round-up post. Well, if I’d known back then that 2014 would be even more crazy and over the top, I wouldn’t have mention it at all. I’m planning on integrating an extra page for stats comparison in the near future, but for now, just know that I almost doubled the number of books I aquired. That wouldn’t be that bad, if last year’s number hadn’t been 184.
Last year, I blamed my increased hamstering on my fellow book bloggers who just happen to recommend way too many books to me. This year, I blame it on working for a publishing company for six months and getting incredible discounts and books for free. How am I supposed to say no to that?!
But let’s get to the lovely yet totally crazy newbie & TBR pile stats of 2014.
Newbies
It’s really fascinating seeing how this got out of hand. Book hauls up to 20 is more or less what I call normal, the rest – not so much. Easter was my excuse of giving myself bookish presents, July till October were the high season of my internship. At first, I didn’t think October would get out of hand since I was going to stay at the booth at the bookfair for most of the time. I underestimated the alluring colleague discounts and book swapping extravaganza. In the end, the publishing industry is kind of a huge family. From the end of November to Christmas, I was on holidays in London, Edinburgh, Galway, and Dublin – and got so many books I had to send a parcel home in advance. Well, and then there was Christmas …
Here are some stats I keep about my purchases. I added the changes to last year’s numbers in percentages. It’s interesting that the number of e-books went up so much considering I still don’t own an e-reader. Alas, I paid for only a handful of them. The rest I got for free from my publisher or Internet retailers. I’m also not surprised to see the hardcover figure decreasing. I do love hardcovers so very much but they are expensive. If one buys as many books as I do, price matters a great deal. Furthermore, if I have the choice, I take what gives me more books for the same price.
Of the 351 books, only 8 were books I’d read before. It’s pretty clear that I bought most of the books just because I wanted to have them, not because I wanted to read them at once, indicated by the meagre 28 books I managed to read from my 2014 purchases.
TBR Pile
You might recall that I participated in the TBR-Reduction-Extreme-Challenge in which you aim to achieve a monthly TBR reduction goal. My goal was to reduce it by two books a month. I achieved that once (last year, thrice). I really don’t know why I enrolled for 2015. However, although I did get much more books than last year, I also managed to read more books from my TBR pile, 104 in total. In 2013, it was only 67 books, 37 books less. In case you’re wondering about the wopping 17 books in April: I had a lot of half-read books on my currently reading shelf at that time and decided to finish as many as possible.
It’s actually a good thing the average time a 2014 first read had spent on my TBR pile has increased. It means that I read more of the books that I bought years back, decreasing the overall age of my TBR. In August, I started participating in a challenge to decrease said age by reading more of the older books. That’s the reason there’s much more yellow and red in the pie chart than last year.
Since June, I’m keeping a spreadsheet tracking my TBR. Besides the stats sheet, I’ve got a sheet for every year I have books left on my TBR, indicating among others the number of books left to read, the number of pages, and the date of purchase. Unfortunately, I just recently finished adding a major part of dates of purchases and detected some books I had sorted into the wrong year. Therefore, I can’t give you the overall 2014 overview since it was faulty. However, I can give you some of the stats:
Number of Books on TBR by Year of Purchase:
Unknown: 153 // 2005: 14 // 2006: 5 // 2007: 34 // 2008: 21 // 2009: 59 // 2010: 32 // 2011: 46 // 2012: 153 // 2013: 123 // 2014: 317
End of Year Total Number of Books on TBR: 959
End of Year Total Number of Pages to Read: 329,657
I read 22,168 first read pages in 2014 [The numbers below are slightly off; my reading spreadsheet tracks pages read per month, which gives the exact pages read a year since unfinished books are split accordingly when taken into the next year. The TBR spreadsheet counts the whole book when entering the finishing date.] This means that if I weren’t aquiring any more books, I’d finish off my TBR in about 15 years.
This is a rough overview of the number of first reads as well as their pages read in 2014 split into the years of purchase. I’m glad that the books of unknown date of purchase make up a huge chunk of books read. Most of the books on that list date back to pre-2010 before I started properly keeping track on the dates of purchase. However, some might as well be remnants of pre-2000.
Oh, I love your statistics. I don’t quite know why, but they always make me laugh. :’D You’ll definitely have to write a piece in 15 years to show how far you got with your tbr pile.
Actually, buying an e-reader eventually would be a good thing. It’s money you can’t use for books, so there’s that!
Yeah, maybe because they just prove that I’m totally crazy xD ! Well, let’s see how it turns out … who knows what’ll happen till then.
The thing is that I want to be able to read all formats and that means I would have to buy a tablet and they are soooo expensive and not as good as eReaders. Or I have to wait till there’s only one format left but I don’t see that happen in the near future.
Well, there are three options: 1) You succeeded, hooray! 2) Everything’s the same, let’s try another 15 years. 3) You’ve unfortunately been buried by books. Which is actually a nice alliteration and doesn’t sound too bad.
Though most eReaders can read multiple formats? The only problem would be mobi/Kindle and ePub/the rest of the world? I think the Kobo Touch also reads mobi files – though then you’d have to get your Amazon puchases on that device, of course … But they do offer the option to transfer the file via USB cable, so maybe that could work, too? Or Amazon keeps being a dick and doesn’t let that happen, who knows. xD
Well, I guess it’s going to be option 3 … that obituary is going to be interesting 😉
And that’s exactly my issue. One third of my ebooks are mobis, one third is ePub and the rest PDF, so they are not really the problem. I think I just have to get a tablet. If they wouldn’t be so damn expensive…
More important: are those books going to be buried with you? Or even ALL of your books?
What I’ve been trying to say: there are eReaders (Kobo) which – in theory – can read all those formats, and they’re definitely cheaper than tablets. I’m just not sure whether it works that easily. xD
NOOOOOOOOO! My poor babies! You know, a couple of them are quite rare – even if they are ‘just’ horse novels. I wouldn’t want to take away books from this world. Too many disappear already.
Yeah, maybe I’ll look into it. Right now, I’d rather invest in a new laptop. That’s kind of more important/urgent.
Du bist irre xD Aber schön, dass du uns das so öffentlich zugänglich machst ;D
Im Gegensatz zu Shiku glaube ich, dass ein eReader dein Untergang wäre. Du würdest dich totkaufen mit den ganzen Angeboten… andererseits nehmen die wenigstens keinen Platz weg 😉
Hast du eigentlich mal ans Aussortieren gedacht? Bei 900+ Büchern hätte ich gar nicht das Gefühl, das mich das alles noch interessiert. Anders bei dir?
Ich weiß xD ! Das Problem wäre dann wohl, dass ich mich damit erstmal totkaufen würde, um dann all die Bücher, die mir gefallen, nochmal fürs Regal zu holen. Das wäre also doppelt schlecht ^^ .
Ich hab zwar ein paar Bücher (allerdings sind das auch nicht wirklich viele), die quasi auf meiner schwarzen Liste stehen, allerdings kann ich die nicht aussortieren, bevor ich sie gelesen habe. Das sind Bücher, bei denen ich mir unsicher bin, ob sie mir denn nun gefallen würden, oder nicht. Weggeben kann ich die aber so nicht, ich könnte sie ja doch mögen. Ist ein bisschen tricky, aber es sind halt jetzt wirklich eigentlich keine Bücher dabei, die mich so ganz und gar überhaupt nicht mehr interessieren. Die einzigen Bücher, die ich ungelesen weggeben kann, sind Reihenfortsetzungen, wenn mir da der erste bzw. die vorherigen Bände nicht gefallen haben. Reihen kann ich mittlerweile ganz gut abbrechen ^^ .