A Book Hoarder
by Laurie Garrison
Are you a book hoarder? Do you keep buying or grabbing free books
and downloading them in your device? Do you have more than 300, 500 or 1k+
books in your device now that you haven’t even considered touching? If so, you
might be viewed as a book hoarder and here is why.
With today’s technology and all of the free and huge box sets that
sell at cheap rates, it’s easy to gather over 300+ in a small device in no
time. Will you ever read all of those books or do you just keep downloading and
hoarding more?
What is a hoarder? They are people that offend times have some
sort of difficulties or disorder during their lifetime and they start
collecting everything. Heck some even goes out of their way to gather more
stuff to keep filling their houses with. Often times their house is so overrun
that they can’t even walk through their house and most of these houses are
condemned for health reasons.
I believe since e-readers,
free downloads and box-sets have come in to play readers are becoming book
hoarders. Sure we have always has a couple of bookshelves full of books in our
house but when we run out of room and money, we’d say enough, it’s time to quit
buying and start reading what we have now.
With the introduction of the new e-readers, free, very cheap and
box-sets readers have been downloading more and more daily and it’s causing
readers to become book hoarders because they just keep downloading and
downloading without reading the books they downloaded. E-readers takes up zero
space in their house so they can have as many books as they want and let’s not
forget to count the fact that you can now days get books at least half, if not for
free from the cost of normal book prices just a couple of years ago, so this
has caused a downloading frenzy for some people. People has to see how many
free books they can download. They
figure what the hey, it’s free why not download and heck I might get around to
reading it one day but if not who cares, I did have to pay anything or heck it
was only .99 cents for 10 books in one set and this is where the hoarding
begins. They just keep adding and adding without thought that they will ever
read any of those books the author wrote.
Why is it so important to read what you download? Because someone
took time to write and pay to publish that book you’re downloading and they
hope you will read it and love it, so you will come back for more or at least
tell others and they can sale more books that way. They have bills too
regardless of what you might think. The thing is the readers never gets
around to reading them, why? Because we have too freaking many!
Look at it this way in one year I downloaded over 400 free
books without going out each day and looking for freebies. I know tons of
readers spend their days looking for that next free book they can download and
never read. It’s like a drug and they have to have that free book and little do
they know they are also becoming hoarders by doing this. You might think I am
joking about this but I am not. I stopped offering giveaways on my blog for a
reason, it’s because it’s like a drugs to some people and all they wanted to do
was to see if they can win a free book and they would sit for days and go to
each blog and enter to win free books. I have seen this done first hand and
said no more on my blog. I also had an author to tell me that she asked the
reader to please give her a review after she reads the free book and that
winner told her “I don’t read books I just like to enter to win contest.” In
other words she was a sweepstakes junkie and how do you think that author felt
hearing this as she was sending this person a book of hers to read? Not, good I
will tell you that. We can become book download junkies too, just think about
that for a minute while I run some numbers here.
An average reader will read at least one novel a week so that
means an average reader will read fifty-two novels a year.
So, let’s go back to my free downloads in one year. I downloaded a
little over 400. (I am sticking with even numbers here:-)
400 books-52 weeks =348. It would take me a total of seven years
just to read the free books I downloaded. Just think about that, it would take
me seven years to get through the 400 I downloaded. Heck by the time I get to
some books the author would have stopped writing. Even if you bump it up to 2
books a week it’s only going to cut it down to about three years. Then you have
some that don’t even get time to read one book a month because of jobs and other
reasons. So, it could take even longer for someone to go through 400 downloads.
So, this bring me back to book hoarding. Look and see how many
books you have downloaded in your device and make sure you count each book in
that box-set too. They usually have over ten books in each set so, let’s say if
a person downloads twenty box sets at $0.99 or whatever price the box set was
at the time then they have 1k books right there. Wow, and that is not counting
all of their freebies and paid books they also downloaded. They will never get
to read them. Face it if you are kind of person that already has over 1k
and you keep downloading and not reading them, then you’re a book hoarder, if
you like to hearing that or not. This sounds like it’s a good thing but if you
not reading the books it’s not again someone took their time and spent their
money to write and publish that book just so someone can get some enjoyment
from it.
I still say if people had to pay a good decent price for a book
you’ll find they would only buy what they really want try to read. PERIOD.
