The Books I’m Actually Going to Read

There was a time when it made sense to grab a book the moment you saw it.

If you spotted a paperback in the bookstore window and thought you might want to read it someday, you bought it then and there. Because in a month’s time another book would take its place, and unless your library bought the hardcover or you stumbled across a dog-eared copy in a second-hand shop years later, that book was gone.

I grew up as a reader in that world. Books were temporary. If you wanted one, you grabbed it.

These days, I think I’m still shopping as if books can disappear.  I’m sure you’ve experience even a little of it yourself.  The endless scraping and gathering. Library holds. Prime Reading. BookBub deals. Author giveaways. Every single BookFunnel promo that looks vaguely interesting. It becomes a reflex. A habit. I see a book, I click, I acquire.

A reader once told me she had more than 15,000 unread books in her ebook library.

Fifteen thousand.

Even if she read three books a day, every day, she would never finish them all. So why collect them?

I’ve been doing some heavy thinking about this over the last week or so, and I’ve realized that I’m not collecting books because I want to read them. I’m collecting them because I want to be the sort of reader who reads those books.

That’s not the same thing at all.

I used to tell myself that there was no harm in downloading the freebie or snapping up the discounted ebook. After all, it cost nothing. Or ninety-nine cents. Or “only” $2.99.

The price of books used to be a natural brake on this kind of collecting. In 1990, a mass market paperback commonly cost about $4.99. In today’s dollars, that is roughly $12.50.

When every book cost the equivalent of twelve or thirteen dollars, you thought before you bought. You bought the books you genuinely wanted to read, not the books you vaguely imagined a future version of yourself might perhaps, one day, maybe get around to.

There was another limit, too: there were simply fewer books.

Traditional publishing controlled the number of books released every month. Artificially, yes, because publishers worried about “exhausting” readers and bookstores only had so much shelf space. But the result was that there were fewer titles competing for your attention.

Now? The numbers are absurd.

In the United States alone, more than 4.1 million new books were published in 2025, and roughly 3.5 million of those were self-published. That works out to more than 11,000 new books every single day.

No one can read everything anymore.

Truthfully, no one could have probably read everything even twenty years ago. But now the idea is laughable. The firehose is too big. There are more books released every day than any reader could get through in a year. Which means the old collecting instinct no longer makes sense.

Because here is the other thing that has changed, and I think we forget this when we’re in acquisition mode:  Books do not go out of print anymore.

That book you spotted in a newsletter today? The one you think you might like someday? It will still be there in six months. Or six years.

If it’s an ebook, it may as well be carved into the side of a mountain.  The book is not going anywhere.  So if I have no plans to read it now—or at least in the near future—why am I grabbing it?

This applies to freebies just as much as regularly priced books. Perhaps even more so, because freebies are so easy to justify. They don’t cost money, so it feels as though they don’t cost anything.

But they do cost something. They cost attention. They cost mental clutter. They become another title sitting in Calibre or on the Kindle, another tiny reminder of something I meant to do and haven’t done.

And eventually, the unread books stop feeling exciting and start feeling faintly oppressive.  My ebook library begins to resemble one of those spare rooms where people shove things they can’t bear to throw away. The door still closes, but only just.

I don’t want that anymore.

I don’t want a library full of books that represent an imaginary future self. I want a library full of books I have actually read. Books with highlights and notes. Books with bent corners and remembered scenes. Books that are mine because I have lived in them.

When I read only print books—because that was all there was—I read books almost as soon as I acquired them. I want to get back to that. So from now on, my plan is simple: if I acquire a book, I intend to read it in the next little while.

Not next year. Not in retirement. Not in the magical future when I somehow become the sort of person who reads twenty-seven books about medieval embroidery, the Napoleonic Wars, and Scandinavian noir in the same month.

Just now. Or soon.

And if I’m not ready to read it yet, then I’ll leave it where it is.

Bookland is not going anywhere.

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Even More Time Kissed Moments
Camlann
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