I think there are books that cover this topic. I've bought "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up", "It's all too much", "Decluttering at the Speed of Life" and more...
Find a Little Free Library and leave some good books you don’t plan on reading or rereading soon. Every city should have these. Benefit of this is that karma works and someone else will usually leave something nice.
This is what I do to get rid of books. There are a few near my home, so if I go for a walk around the neighborhood I'll bring a book to dropoff. It's really interesting to see which books stay and which books leave. Nobody's picked up the haskell book in the months it's been there, but Watchmen has come and gone a few times.
We have about 10 working walking distance of our house. The only thing that’s prevented me from putting one up myself is the number of Little Free Libraries around. I’ve been trying to come up with a fun alternative. There is a “little blockbuster” concept, but I feel like of mostly just lose my movies instead enriching the community.
A couple places near me have "little art galleries" where people display small art pieces, with some decoration like little action figures or easels. I think one is open so that anybody can put some art up, and another exclusively displays art chosen by the owner.
There are about 4 near my home. I check them regularly. They are filled with books that stay there for several months. I'll add one when there's room.
If I was running one, I'd have maybe 10x what will fit in it, and constantly rotate them. The ones that don't move within a couple months go to the thrift store.
P.S. the books I add are scifi. They never last more than a week :-)
> If I was running one, I'd have maybe 10x what will fit in it, and constantly rotate them. The ones that don't move within a couple months go to the thrift store.
That's how I run mine. About twice a week I rotate ~10 books. Either ones that have been there for longer or ones that I know will never be taken anyway. (I leave everything for at least a week, but the 'guide to 2004 Honda Civic maintenance' never stood a chance...)
Every once in a while I sort through my 'additional collection' that I keep inside my house and take the unattractive ones to the thrift store.
I’m not offering an explanation for the behavior, just an observation. “It’s strange that some people are psychotics” isn’t really that controversial of a statement.
I've had to deal with this a lot and here are some things I did:
- Upgraded all my bookshelves (from 5-shelf bookshelves to slightly wider 7-shelf bookshelves)
- Bought more bookshelves for wherever there was wall space
- Bought a bunch of airtight containers and put books I'm less likely to read away in the basement (they're inventoried for easy search)
We also bought doors for all our bookshelves at one point, but that's more about book care than increasing book capacity.
Right now I actually have bookshelf space for more books, but I'll probably need to go through the containers in the basement and actually get rid of some books eventually. :(
Our basement is somewhat humid so we do use dessicant. We use packets that change color when they absorb moisture [1] and they change color pretty rapidly, even in the airtight container. I keep meaning to rotate them for fresh packets regularly, but I think I've only done that once. The dessicant I've linked can be dehumidified in the oven, so it's possible to rotate and reuse them repeatedly.
The correct answer is "buy more books." Duh. The correct number of books to own is always n+x where n = the number of books you own today, and x = an integer > 0.
>> The correct answer is "buy more books." Duh. The correct number of books to own is always n+x where n = the number of books you own today, and x = an integer > 0.
> Well, you might also want to buy another bookshelf at some point, but otherwise I don't see the flaw in the logic.
Simply move all the existing books along the shelf by one space. Then insert the new book in the new space. To add lots of new books, move all the existing books from space n to space n*2 and insert the new books in the new spaces.
Funny you would mention that. I just went through that process about a month ago. I put in three new 5-shelf bookcases along the one of the few remaining walls I have, which wasn't already lined with book-cases.
Sell, donate, give away to wherever (usually I do that to my local govt/public library) or whoever you can. If that didn't work, call the scrap dealer. I mean yeah I love my books but what the hell. Then I buy more books and repeat.
I'm starting a sustainable book marketplace to encourage people to buy and sell second hand books. It's only on a waitlist for now but I think from an ecological standpoint there's a lot to gain
In Australia a lot of books have to be imported manually, often with a ~25USD shipping cost, so I guess yes if a bookshop has your book, but oftentimes no
What should I do with books from my childhood that are completely outdated? My mom has massive books that I asked for as a kid or my dad bought that are decades old. Things like Visual Basics 6 in 24 hours, the Photoshop 5 Bible, etc. I think there might be slight utility in slightly less old books like Excel 2007 for Dummies (Excel basics are still Excel basics), but I am completely unsure of the utility of books for software that doesn't even exist anymore.
I feel bad throwing away 500+ page books, but it seems like I'd just be polluting a free library if I put them in there.
Here's how I think of it. They either go to the landfill, or your house is a landfill. So you're not really saving stuff from the landfill.
I'm in the process of helping my mom sell her house and move into a small apartment. Fortunately her nearby public library takes donations. I think that they have an annual book sale and use the proceeds to support library operations.
I've gotten pretty ruthless about throwing things away. It's not too hard to follow a plan such as a cubic foot per week. The number of books that I'm emotionally attached to dwindles with time.
Discard out. They're just inert objects, with little utility. You won't find those books at the public library any more because libraries ruthlessly weed out books people no longer want. Otherwise there'd be no room for the new books people do want.
I burned all mine for heat, giving the books one final purpose. I got rid of things that used to be very precious to me -- an ancient book on HTML, a very old guide to CSS, hilariously outdated texts on stuff like Java 1.4 design patterns, guides to software that doesn't exist in any form and stuff like that. The books served their purpose. They were born from the carbon in the air and back to the Earth they went.
Recyclers will pay good money for books since they tend to be high quality/clean paper. If they are outdated tech books in particular, I have zero guilt recycling those.
If I find that kind of shit in my free library, it immediately goes to the (properly recycled) trash. Nobody will take it, it's just taking up space and bringing down the attractiveness of my library.
I suppose one consequence of being a serial renter that has moved around every 1-3 years is that it changed my relationship with having a large volume of books. Seeing a bookcase full of books does bring me joy but it simultaneously makes me think "oh, I'm going to have to lug all those boxes up and down stairs during the next move". I still have a shelf full of books, most of which I have a particularly fond emotional connection with. But otherwise, I resist the urge to buy more (I have a fantastic library nearby) and shamelessly pare, donate and give away anything I do acquire.
A few years ago I sold/donated every book I own. Literally every book, except for a handful of author-signed books that had memento value.
Most things I can find online or at the library. There were a few out of print books that I can’t get through the library and I regretted selling, but they were easy enough to replace. I now have a very small collection (single shelf) next to my desk.
Turns out 9 out of 10 of the books I thought I could never part with, I have never thought of or cared for since I got rid of them.
I did the same. I had barely any possessions; my laptop, a toothbrush, clothes, a desk lamp, pots/pans/knives. But I made up for that with boxes upon boxes of almost every book I've ever owned. I eventually catalogued the lot, found digital copies of all of them, and donated everything to a charity shop. Now, instead of 5 or 6 boxes full to the brim that need a rental van every time I move, I have a NAS that stores maybe 10k+ books; more than I could collect in a lifetime. I miss the feeling of a page turn, but I can just power on my tablet and have every book I could ever want to read at my fingertips now.
Man I wish I could get my other possessions under control like that. Or more to the point my wife’s ;)
But I can’t give up the physical experience of reading on paper. Even e-ink displays don’t do it for me. Nevertheless I can get paper copies of almost anything I need from the library, and I’m a member of multiple local libraries.
Ditto. Renting in London means space is a premium and moves are frequent. I limit myself to one bookshelf. I also try to get everything digitally that I can.
I have a room overflowing with books, nominally called "the office" in the house, although there are books in every bedroom, and several overstuffed bookshelves in the lounge too. It got to the point that my Sandershelf moved out to the shed...
I didn't get rid of any of the books. Instead I started buying e-books. I now have more e-books than books, and they all fit onto my iPad Pro. Sure, it's not the same, but it is a bit more practical, and I get to search far easier. Plus less dead trees :)
Earlier this year we cleared my parents house prior to selling it, which meant dealing with my father's book collection. He had wide ranging interests, from jazz to town planning, and it was quite a task figuring out what of the 1500-odd books was junk, what was worth donating, and what was worth selling.
Some was easy: the 200 or so mountaineering books were gratefully received by the Alpine Club library, and the few first editions (Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, folks like that) got £750 from a bookseller. The ones that have been most difficult to find a good home for are the large format art books, which no-one seems to want.
And I've kept too many fascinating volumes, so it hasn't exactly helped my book collection, but we've found homes for most of them.
6. (Recommended) use a free service like goshippo, pirateship or shipstation (free through PayPal: paypal.shipstation.com) to buy the postage at significant discount.
If there are any questions you can email them. They understand that many books do not contain barcodes or isbns. I have an elderly friend who was a slavic anthropologist. We've been in contact with them for months and have sent off something like 20 boxes of mid-century cultural academic literature focusing on hungary and other regions (I'm no expert there ... sorry if I got some term wrong).
As far as what to donate that you probably have? Magazines. 2600, Usenix journal, make, wired, datamation, byte, creative computing, etc. You'd be surprised how many holes they have. You'll see like 18 complete months then a 10 month hole, then like 7 more complete months, etc ... it's far from done.
It's valuable. For instance, the high flying pollyana nonsense of 90s wired magazines is probably embarrassing to read now but it's also a very important cultural context for historians and academics - imagine a 25 year old phd student of say, science&technology studies, trying to get a grasp on ~1998 silicon valley culture. I was there, they weren't - these old rags are important to preserve.
What do archive.org do with books once they've been "archived"?
I have much more faith in the ability of paper books to maintain an archive of knowledge and experience, than an ever-expanding digital warehouse that is reliant on charitable donations.
Specifically: high-density, climate-controlled storage. Books are boxed, palleted, and shrinkwrapped.
They can be retrieved, though not especially speedily.
"Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book" (2012)
"There is always going to be a role for books," said Kahle, as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. "We want to see books live forever."
So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides....
If someone does need to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it....
Especially when archive.org has been caught deleting stuff from family members of the board. Lost a lot of respect for them that they were willing to delete any content when that's the supposed exact opposite of their stated goals.
Someone needs to reinvent the bookshelf. Storing books needs to be more space efficient while still allowing access. Looking good is an important bonus. As is being relatively cheap and portable. This is a yet unsolved social emergency.
I designed and built my own. Available in two varieties. Paperbacks and hardbacks. I swear that just about every book case I've ever looked at is designed by someone who doesn't own a lot of books, doesn't love books, and doesn't really think about books other than things that go on coffee tables or a few shelves. I made my book cases 26" wide, pine for the carcase, maple for the shelves that can be flipped over and work in any direction. 7' 8" tall, which means it will clear a standard height 8ft ceiling in just about any house in the US built in the last 50 years. Book case depth was either 6" deep or 8.5" deep depending on if the book case was meant to hold paperbacks or hardbacks. A single fixed shelf at the one third mark. Shelf pin holes every 1.5". Limited width of shelf means the span won't sag very much, maple has a high Jenka rating, so it doesn't sag as much as composites or fast growth pine. If the maple shelves do sag a bit over time, flip them over and then they can sag back the other way. If the front of the shelf gets dinged up, flip it around. The fixed shelf prevents the carcase from bowing out, and placing the shelf about 1/3rd of the way up permits maximum flexibility in shelf positioning. Interesting side-note, the paint on 30 book cases weighs more than 40lbs.
My ~/documents/books folder is very quickly replacing my bookshelf. Integration with org-roam means my library can be massive and still accessible. It doesn't look particularly great though.
I just use M-x org-store-link when I get somewhere in an ebook that I want to take a note on (this works most places in Emacs, not just ebooks). Then I use org-roam to capture the note, and link it to whatever I want to discover it from, so I can find the note later.
There are other features / extensions like org-roam-bibtex and org-cite that I haven't quite integrated until my workflow, those also look useful for dealing with ebook references (and other kinds of references).
I bought CD storage boxes, like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000EFJY3U/, and then used both the lid and the box to put paperbacks in. Stored alphabetically, spine up. I then stuck those in cupboards.
It is amazing how much more efficient this is for paperbacks than a regular bookshelf!
And that reduced my problem down to one which a regular bookshelf could handle, albeit with some creative packing into the bookshelf.
I have yet to visit any house that couldn't have another couple of hundred books squirreled away inside of it with careful planning. I have visited a few friends who created built in book alcoves between the timbers of the house, cutting out a section of dry wall, adding shelves, and framing in the alcove.
When I moved from our 4,000 sqft house to a 2,000 sqft condo we divested ourselves of the 800 linear feet of custom built book shelves. Not a huge amount, by some measurements, but is still "quite a lot of books." Not quite enough to warp L-space, but enough that I swear I could hear the occasional Ook! from what we euphemistically called The Library. We pared down to a much more reasonable 200 linear feet.
I will say that going through those books was an emotional toil for both my wife and I. But after moving six or so times in 20 years for work, it was time.
When you have to move around the country a bunch of times in a few years and each time those precious books make up more than half of a 26' ft truck packed tightly into small, heavy boxes, you get tired of having books quite quickly...
...but then again, I can't find many to part with anymore after all of the rounds of culling that were done. And so it goes.
The last time we moved, we used a company whose rates were based on weight.
I was chatting with our moving company’s owner about how interesting it was to look at everything in our house, and ask myself, “am I willing to pay $x.xx/lb to keep this?”
He said the most expensive move they’d ever done was for a married couple of literature professors, who were unwilling to part with any of their collection.
You can do a lot of clever book storage, but it tends to be quite a lot of work to do so. Because you’re going to have to build things yourself to make it custom fit. This is a process which involves quite a lot of creativity and spatial awareness to do well, on top of the manual labour and at least some craftsmanship (books are heavy) to accomplish. So it’s not weird to me at all that many people struggle with it. I mean for many that combination of things + the time it takes isn’t easy, and then if you can’t pay for it, it’s just a massive project to accomplish in your free time. Tinyhome and DIY YouTube videos are excellent for inspiration, but it’s still a lot of work to get it done in a way that looks nice.
What strikes me as the wildest, and this is obviously very anecdotal for the place where I live in Denmark, is how little help you can get from “pre-made” solutions. IKEA has the least inspiring book storage options known to man. Which might be expected, but around here every store is basically stocking what IKEA has, at least until until you get into the 10x and above price ranging. Which is where you’re probably hiring an interior designer and handymen to do it for/with you anyway. You can do a lot of clever hacks with a lot of the Ikea styles furniture, but much of it is in really shitty materials and for books (books are heavy) it’s almost always better to buy wood and stuff to hang wood on walls and then do it yourself.
So while I agree with what you say, I also appreciate why it’s just easier to have a pile of books.
Consider optimal book packing in higher dimensions [1].
Treating your 3D house as a 2D surface on which to store books obviously misses the point that you could fill the house with books and simply crawl to the various amenities using carefully optimised passages.
discoverability: knowing that do actually you have a book. this can be ensured by having a recognizable side of each book visibly exposed. This helps prevent, among others, embarrassing moments when you realize you bought a second copy of a book you already have
recoverability: ability to pull a book (for those rare instances that you will actually need to do so)
admittedly these constraints would make 3D book packing less dense than a sphere packing. the closest solution is probably mobile shelving [1]. Now we only need to find a way to live in such a place :-)
I’m sure you’re joking, but having recently finished reading “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things”, there _are_ people who live that way. I think piles of magazines & newspapers were more common than books, with “goat paths” through them.
Commit your favorites to memory, that's the only sure way to preserve them... for a while anyway. Well, that was a 1953 book. This quartz crystal encoding scheme looks interesting... or maybe just transcribe them to cuneiform clay tablets, those seem to have the current record for longevity (future generations might not even recognize that the quartz crystals contained data):
I have a long-term plan to use books as poor-mans-but-pretty-or-at-least-unusual sound insulation. As floor to ceiling as possible whilst also being shelved.
Not for a party room, but for a reading room / library / study / peaceful room.
I'm not planning to move house anytime between now and my, hopefully far distant, death.
145 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 231 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20100210092717/http://www.bookvi...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Presumably you can fit a few more books in there too.
If I was running one, I'd have maybe 10x what will fit in it, and constantly rotate them. The ones that don't move within a couple months go to the thrift store.
P.S. the books I add are scifi. They never last more than a week :-)
That's how I run mine. About twice a week I rotate ~10 books. Either ones that have been there for longer or ones that I know will never be taken anyway. (I leave everything for at least a week, but the 'guide to 2004 Honda Civic maintenance' never stood a chance...)
Every once in a while I sort through my 'additional collection' that I keep inside my house and take the unattractive ones to the thrift store.
* Books I want to fully read soon.
* Books I can't see myself fully reading, which subdivides into:
* Books I want to keep as references.
* Books I can't see myself ever reading or needing to refer to.
Get rid of everything in the last category. Repeat this process once a year.
> the human proclivity
to pathologize behaviour that has yet to be understood. Labeling psychotics as posessed by demons comes to mind. ADHD too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElaL9Zo_Oes
[edit]
Zero snark intended
- Upgraded all my bookshelves (from 5-shelf bookshelves to slightly wider 7-shelf bookshelves)
- Bought more bookshelves for wherever there was wall space
- Bought a bunch of airtight containers and put books I'm less likely to read away in the basement (they're inventoried for easy search)
We also bought doors for all our bookshelves at one point, but that's more about book care than increasing book capacity.
Right now I actually have bookshelf space for more books, but I'll probably need to go through the containers in the basement and actually get rid of some books eventually. :(
[1] https://dryndry.com/products/5-gram-aiwa-orange-indicating-p...
> Well, you might also want to buy another bookshelf at some point, but otherwise I don't see the flaw in the logic.
Simply move all the existing books along the shelf by one space. Then insert the new book in the new space. To add lots of new books, move all the existing books from space n to space n*2 and insert the new books in the new spaces.
- my study has books on business, tech, biographies, history
- our formal living has all the show off books (coffee tables, writings we bought but never read)
- our kitchen has all cooking
- our family room has stories, fiction, etc
> A fully-featured Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads > StoryGraph is the all-in-one platform for your bookish needs.
https://thestorygraph.com/
Ourlit.com
I feel bad throwing away 500+ page books, but it seems like I'd just be polluting a free library if I put them in there.
Acknowledge that the Visual Basic 6 book has done its job for you, thank it for its service, and lovingly place it in the recycling bin.
Think of it as allowing a loved colleague to retire in their old age rather than firing a friend.
About 6 months later an emulator was released that I could have played in :(
I'm in the process of helping my mom sell her house and move into a small apartment. Fortunately her nearby public library takes donations. I think that they have an annual book sale and use the proceeds to support library operations.
I've gotten pretty ruthless about throwing things away. It's not too hard to follow a plan such as a cubic foot per week. The number of books that I'm emotionally attached to dwindles with time.
Keeping the one will remind you of the entire collection. And it's a nice memento of your childhood, and of those who helped you learn.
No regrets, I was never going to read any of those that I gave away and I do all my reading on ebook nowadays anyway.
Most things I can find online or at the library. There were a few out of print books that I can’t get through the library and I regretted selling, but they were easy enough to replace. I now have a very small collection (single shelf) next to my desk.
Turns out 9 out of 10 of the books I thought I could never part with, I have never thought of or cared for since I got rid of them.
10/10 would purge again.
But I can’t give up the physical experience of reading on paper. Even e-ink displays don’t do it for me. Nevertheless I can get paper copies of almost anything I need from the library, and I’m a member of multiple local libraries.
All I see now is "what a pain in the ass".
The physical nature of books use to be a feature over ebooks and audio books for me but now they are a total bug.
I didn't get rid of any of the books. Instead I started buying e-books. I now have more e-books than books, and they all fit onto my iPad Pro. Sure, it's not the same, but it is a bit more practical, and I get to search far easier. Plus less dead trees :)
Some was easy: the 200 or so mountaineering books were gratefully received by the Alpine Club library, and the few first editions (Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, folks like that) got £750 from a bookseller. The ones that have been most difficult to find a good home for are the large format art books, which no-one seems to want.
And I've kept too many fascinating volumes, so it hasn't exactly helped my book collection, but we've found homes for most of them.
2. Search for your book on https://archive.org/ or use https://archive.org/want
3. If you do not find it, put it in box.
4. Repeat 2 & 3 as much as desired.
5. Take box and follow instructions: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
6. (Recommended) use a free service like goshippo, pirateship or shipstation (free through PayPal: paypal.shipstation.com) to buy the postage at significant discount.
If there are any questions you can email them. They understand that many books do not contain barcodes or isbns. I have an elderly friend who was a slavic anthropologist. We've been in contact with them for months and have sent off something like 20 boxes of mid-century cultural academic literature focusing on hungary and other regions (I'm no expert there ... sorry if I got some term wrong).
As far as what to donate that you probably have? Magazines. 2600, Usenix journal, make, wired, datamation, byte, creative computing, etc. You'd be surprised how many holes they have. You'll see like 18 complete months then a 10 month hole, then like 7 more complete months, etc ... it's far from done.
It's valuable. For instance, the high flying pollyana nonsense of 90s wired magazines is probably embarrassing to read now but it's also a very important cultural context for historians and academics - imagine a 25 year old phd student of say, science&technology studies, trying to get a grasp on ~1998 silicon valley culture. I was there, they weren't - these old rags are important to preserve.
I have much more faith in the ability of paper books to maintain an archive of knowledge and experience, than an ever-expanding digital warehouse that is reliant on charitable donations.
Pro tip: you can send books media mail via the US Postal Service at a reduced cost.
They can be retrieved, though not especially speedily.
"Internet Archive founder turns to new information storage device – the book" (2012)
"There is always going to be a role for books," said Kahle, as he perched on the edge of a shipping container soon to be tricked out as a climate-controlled storage unit. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. "We want to see books live forever."
So far, Kahle has gathered about 500,000 books. He thinks the warehouse itself is large enough to hold about a million titles, with each one given a barcode that identifies the cardboard box, pallet and shipping container in which it resides....
If someone does need to see an actual physical copy of a book, Kahle said it should take no more than an hour to fetch it....
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/01/internet-archi...>
I didn't find that on a quick web search -- do you have a link?
I was once reading 'Rhetoric' by Aristotle on the site and noticed a lot of marginalia. Some of it was pretty good commentary too.
Well, it turns out that I was reading John Adam's copy with all his notes.
I wish they had a better method of surfacing all these gems that they have. They might and I'm just lazy.
(And, yes, I've tried to find the link, but unfortunately I need more coffee. If someone can find it, please post it)
There are other features / extensions like org-roam-bibtex and org-cite that I haven't quite integrated until my workflow, those also look useful for dealing with ebook references (and other kinds of references).
It is amazing how much more efficient this is for paperbacks than a regular bookshelf!
And that reduced my problem down to one which a regular bookshelf could handle, albeit with some creative packing into the bookshelf.
When I moved from our 4,000 sqft house to a 2,000 sqft condo we divested ourselves of the 800 linear feet of custom built book shelves. Not a huge amount, by some measurements, but is still "quite a lot of books." Not quite enough to warp L-space, but enough that I swear I could hear the occasional Ook! from what we euphemistically called The Library. We pared down to a much more reasonable 200 linear feet.
I will say that going through those books was an emotional toil for both my wife and I. But after moving six or so times in 20 years for work, it was time.
...but then again, I can't find many to part with anymore after all of the rounds of culling that were done. And so it goes.
I was chatting with our moving company’s owner about how interesting it was to look at everything in our house, and ask myself, “am I willing to pay $x.xx/lb to keep this?”
He said the most expensive move they’d ever done was for a married couple of literature professors, who were unwilling to part with any of their collection.
What strikes me as the wildest, and this is obviously very anecdotal for the place where I live in Denmark, is how little help you can get from “pre-made” solutions. IKEA has the least inspiring book storage options known to man. Which might be expected, but around here every store is basically stocking what IKEA has, at least until until you get into the 10x and above price ranging. Which is where you’re probably hiring an interior designer and handymen to do it for/with you anyway. You can do a lot of clever hacks with a lot of the Ikea styles furniture, but much of it is in really shitty materials and for books (books are heavy) it’s almost always better to buy wood and stuff to hang wood on walls and then do it yourself.
So while I agree with what you say, I also appreciate why it’s just easier to have a pile of books.
Treating your 3D house as a 2D surface on which to store books obviously misses the point that you could fill the house with books and simply crawl to the various amenities using carefully optimised passages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_packing
No point having a book if you can't conveniently retrieve it.
discoverability: knowing that do actually you have a book. this can be ensured by having a recognizable side of each book visibly exposed. This helps prevent, among others, embarrassing moments when you realize you bought a second copy of a book you already have
recoverability: ability to pull a book (for those rare instances that you will actually need to do so)
admittedly these constraints would make 3D book packing less dense than a sphere packing. the closest solution is probably mobile shelving [1]. Now we only need to find a way to live in such a place :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_shelving
https://potentiallyuglyfurniture.wordpress.com/page/2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451
Commit your favorites to memory, that's the only sure way to preserve them... for a while anyway. Well, that was a 1953 book. This quartz crystal encoding scheme looks interesting... or maybe just transcribe them to cuneiform clay tablets, those seem to have the current record for longevity (future generations might not even recognize that the quartz crystals contained data):
https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/6767-...
I just want to go floor to ceiling with them on party walls in part to use as sound insulation.
I have a long-term plan to use books as poor-mans-but-pretty-or-at-least-unusual sound insulation. As floor to ceiling as possible whilst also being shelved.
Not for a party room, but for a reading room / library / study / peaceful room.
I'm not planning to move house anytime between now and my, hopefully far distant, death.
Will remember when my project eventually gets funding approval...