I've... probably halved? over the years. Now I'm getting down to reference works and antiques, and it's getting a bit irreducible. I've just picked a reference book off the shelf that I know had a fairly short print run in 2004 and was $49 then, and it's on Abe for between £228 and £690(!). I freely admit I don't touch many of these books from one year to the next, but the idea of them being put out of my reach in that way makes me nervous.

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.