How many books does your elementary child own? How many do you and spouse have?

[Anonymous]

We have quite a collection and though DD is a voracious reader, she probably has more than she will actually read. I know I do.

Just curious how many books your kids own? And how many do you own? No Kindles or ereaders here, just paper books.

[Anonymous]

We each have enough to fill most of a normal size Billy bookcase, but we also take books that have been outgrown/read to the Friends of the Library pretty often.

[Anonymous]

My kid has a two shelf bookcase so maybe 75-125 books (lots of chapter books so they take up double rows on the bottom shelf). I probably have 75 myself between two bookshelves.

[Anonymous]

She has hundreds, as do we. But hers are actually more merited than ours. I rarely read books again after reading them once (though generally DH and I will read everything at some point so at least two people are eating it). But DD really does read a lot of her books. She rereads a lot of her chapter books, especially series, and still goes back and reads some of her favorite picture books (she's 8). We do go through and purge periodically but if she says she wants to keep a book, I let her. At this point a significant amount of her reading is from the library and she's reading longer chapter books so her acquisition of books has slowed (if she loves a book from the library and wants to reread it, we will often buy it used online), so I don't really mind holding onto the books from when she was younger if she wants to.

I also think a lot of our books, she'll eventually read. She loves science fiction and fantasy and we have a lot of that. So that may pay off eventually too.

[Anonymous]

DP. She has between 70-100. There are several hundred other books in our house. And except for maybe 5 recent book purchases, all books have been read at least once. Many have been read more than once.

[Anonymous]

PP just above. We buy many of our books used, which saves $$$.

[Anonymous]

Three standard bookshelves, because DH is allergic to having paper books cluttering our tiny house. He's the only non-bookworm in the family. We survived for years thanks to the public library and now my teens read on their devices. My youngest is in high school and has read practically all her school's online library of books on her chromebook.

[Anonymous]

When do you pass them on?

[Anonymous]

Way too many. A few hundred at least. But unlike me my kids reread their books regularly so deserve more shelf space. I read slowly and then pass it on.

[Anonymous]

Very few. The library lets us take out up to 50 books so we do 20 per child then swap them out every few weeks. Makes more sense than cluttering the house with books that only get read once.

[Anonymous]

Oof. I think we have about 250 picture and children’s reference books including foreign language picture books, and maybe 100-125 elementary to middle grade easy chapter books, graphic books, comics, and chapter books. I find it really hard to part with picture books. In my defense I think my 8 year old has read around 40-50% of the elementary to middle grade books and I like having them at home so he can read them more than once.

I also have my own children’s books in other languages for my own language learning, so… all in all we have a ton of children’s books. Reading the above PP responses I realize I may be a book hoarder. Not even going to get into how many non children’s books I have…

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Very few. The library lets us take out up to 50 books so we do 20 per child then swap them out every few weeks. Makes more sense than cluttering the house with books that only get read once.

Do you buy the ones they love and want to read again? Or how do you decide what makes the cut in terms of buying?

[Anonymous]

Probably thousands. Don’t want to count…collections of great niche books passed down (mountaineering), multiple grad degrees, now so many kids books, of which I would say 90 percent are read every six months. So many bookshelves.

DH grew up in a bookless house so I’ll take the blame for this!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Probably thousands. Don’t want to count…collections of great niche books passed down (mountaineering), multiple grad degrees, now so many kids books, of which I would say 90 percent are read every six months. So many bookshelves.

DH grew up in a bookless house so I’ll take the blame for this!

How do you house or store so many?? Are they behind closed doors or glass so you don't have to dust?

[Anonymous]

I stopped counting at 1,000. We have lots of tall Billy bookshelves!

My 7 year old has about 100, and that's only because we donated 150 little kid books a few months back.