The Sword and Laser discussion

With limited shelf space, most of my books are in boxes, & have been for years. When I moved last year, I repacked most of them & tried to sort some of my favorite authors into their own boxes. I couldn't find Issola in my box of Brust, so I assumed that was where I left off & bought an ePub edition. Halfway through, I started recognizing some scenes, so I probably have at least 1 copy somewhere.

With ALL THE THINGS in the goodreads database & the ability to make & organize my own shelves, I have decided to inventory my books before buying a fresh copy of Dzur. I have a lot of boxes, so this is going to take a while.

In general, if I remember reading a book but not how I felt about it, I'll rate it 3 stars. This is probably overrating a few while underrating a whole lot. Some I'll rate based on how I feel about the author. I'm finding quite a few that I must have read, but don't remember at all, & I'm leaving those ratings blank.

Duplicates & multiple editions will be many, as it has been easier to get a fresh copy when I wanted to reread something than it was to dig through all the boxes.

Good luck with the inventorying! If I could do this with my books I would, unfortunately all of my boxed books are buried at the back of a storage unit behind most all of my other stuff and thus pretty impossible to get to until such time as I take everything out of there.

I moved into a house with a huge floored attic, so I was able to pull all my stuff out of storage, even if most of it is still in boxes.

I decided it best to donate my books to a library as i do not reread them anyway.

It took me about four months to inventory my 1300 books (on librarything). When I did a purge last year, I kept some in boxes, and noted the box number on my list. I figure if I don't pull stuff from the boxes over the next five years, I might feel good in disposing of my less favorite books.

The inventory (and smartphone access to my list) has been invaluable in not buying multiple copies. Good luck!

I have between 50 & 60 small moving box size boxes of books, magazines, & comic books. A third of them came from my Grandfather's estate & have mostly hardback non-fiction. I also still have most of my college textbooks & have collected more than a few non-fiction books on various subjects myself. I'm trying to work through my fiction 1st, a mix of both book club hardbacks & mass market paperbacks. The boxes with only paperbacks seem to hold around 50 books, so it will be interesting to see just how many books I actually have. I deliberately bought duplicates of some books because I wanted to read them again & it was easier than digging through all the boxes to find them, but I've also found some duplicates that looked interesting at the store that I had forgotten that I had already read.

If you don't have a used book store to return duplicate books to (I don't anymore) then don't forget paperbackswap or bookmooch as swap sites. Or ebay for rare/pretty books. And libraries will usually take used books too.

It took me years to get my books onto LibraryThing. (I still haven't gotten to the nonfiction, but the fiction is up-to-date.) It also took me years to get the library-style plastic dustjacket covers on all of the hardcovers.

I know I should do a purge one of these days, but aside from Tom Clancy and Laurell Hamilton and maybe Mercedes Lackey and Orson Scott Card, I can't think of anything I'm willing to give up.

(I've had a bit more luck with comic books, but I still have a dozen longboxes of mostly 1982-1995 Marvel & DC mainstream stuff that needs a good home.)