However, I don't put books in to the same category of visual clutter. When I look at a messy room or garage, overflowing with stuff, it makes me unhappy. Even after it's better organized, I still feel a little unhappy realizing that so much storage space is taken up by stuff.
Books do feel different. I enjoy seeing them, the sight of a lot of books is actually a little relaxing. They don't stress me out the way other kinds of stuff does.
Sounds like you have a lot of books stacked around... I could see how it might get to the point where you're feeling cluttered. And the main reason I like getting books from the library isn't so much that I don't have to pay for it but that I don't have to find a place to put it after I'm done.
I know the feeling, but a friend showed me the Container Store's "Elfa" shelving, which is pretty easy to install and provides seven to eight individual shelves in a particular space.
You can see a picture of my setup midway down this page: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/january-2012-links...
That said, I could get rid of some of these books... especially older tech books that aren't relevant, either because they're plain out of date, or because I've made a conscious decision to move away from that technology, or both. For example, I have a lot of older books on various Microsoft / Windows technologies like COM, DCOM, ADO, OLE, etc. Frankly, it's very unlikely I'll ever use that stuff again.
> http://my.safaribooksonline.com
I'm definitely thinking about signing up for a Safari subscription soon.
Just generic ones from Office Depot. I have four big ones (3x6 or so?) and one smaller one hanging in my living room (which is more of an office for the startup right now, than it is a "living room").
They're large, heavy, cumbersome objects. They're just more objects to be packed, carried, and worried about.
I don't know... I own on the order of thousands of books (don't have an exact number, can't be bothered to count / catalog them all), and it can be fairly inconvenient, depending on the circumstances. In my own case, I own more books than can comfortably fit in my apartment, which means one of the biggest motivations I have to rent a bigger apartment, or buy a house, is to suit my books. And since my books have long since overflowed the amount of shelf space I have available, they wind up stacked up around the place, which gives my place a cluttered feel.
Moving is also a bitch with all these books. Books can be friggin' heavy.
That said, I still mostly agree with pg that books are different from random "stuff." I treasure my books (well, ok, maybe not that copy of "OLE DB Programming in C++") and figure having too many books is far less severe a sin than, say, a crack cocaine addiction.