Patterns of Book ownership

There may be some stats in here about the types of books people have, but they will almost certainly be about people who have or have read more than 100, it is a book readers site.

Possibly Amazon would release figures about sales, but you would have to make it a very general question.

As a complete but inspired guess I would say that everybody has more then 10 books, children will have story books and/or school books and as they get older will collect recipe books, car manuals, an atlas or two and at least one popular novel. That's just non-readers.
If you include electronic books then probably nobody knows the totals, not even the readers themselves.

oops! where I said 'in here' I meant to post this url to go with it (sorry):
http://www.goodreads.com/

I have a box out by the trash with about 50 books in it, I am slowly depositing a few books at a time each trash day so I don't give the poor trash man a hernia trying to lift the bin.  It may sound sacrilegious but they are all technical books and are no longer relevant.  

I have a lot of books that have not been read in a while and some that have not been read.  My extended family is like a assertive book commune and eventualy you give in and either read the book or keep it for a while and say you've read it.

Among other books lying around I have some books by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Emmet Fox, Teresa of Avila, Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, Leon Uris, Walter Scott, J.R. R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov and the complete works of Kilgore Trout.  The last author being both out of print and only in print.

We have about 1500 books of all sorts. They cover many different categories:
reference
technical - IT, medical
educational
fiction
non-fiction
biographpies
art
history
travel
languages
cookery
and so on

Iaindowns

Hi. You might find the information you are looking for on one or more of the many statistic sites on the Internet.

Can you be a bit more specific about this? What are looking for? Demographic data? What are you comparing? Different countries? Different socio-economic classes?

i don't know if this is anything but it might be a start in the right direction...

http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp

Thanks for all comments to date.

Jason210.

I'm looking for whatever I can get!  Basically if I took a random sample of 1000 Americans (or English, or French, or whoever), how many of them would have more than 10 books in their house, how many would have more than 100 books in their house, how many would have more than 1000 and so on.

It would be interesting, in addition, to find out how this differed by country, by socio-economic class and so on, but I will be happy with bulk figures.

It's easy enough to find figures on book purchasing.  It's easy enough to find figures relating academic acheivement to access to literature of various sorts (thought the test seems to be mainly a boolean one), but I can't find anything that tells me how many books people have.

There's a certain amount of anecdotal evidence (and personal evidence) that some people have loads of books and re-read (or simply collect) and that some people, even if they are big readers, read once and then pass on.

However, I have no idea if it's one in 10 that have loads of books or 1%.

Iain

A random sample of 1000 out of 250 million Americans is unlikely to give you much information to draw patterns from. If you just want to get an idea of who ahs books an who doesn't, then I think you need a much larger sample. Or you traget specific sectors according to social status, income, education and so on. One is to do your own survey. There are several online services that offer tools for you to do that. The problem is finding cannels for this that are easy and cost free, for people to participate. You could for example, use various forums, or if you can get hold of mailing lists and use a white-listed  mailing platform. For example, Constant Contact provides tools for both surveys and mailing lists.
Hope this helps.

The difficulty in gathering these figures will be that those with many books will be happy to boast about it, but those with very few will be unlikely to want to fill in a questionnaire. It looks like you are wanting figures for actual ownership of books and not just books that have been read, hopefully also distinguishing between owned books that have been read/used rather than those that just sit on the shelf to fill up the space.

Yes, you'd have to be careful about how you worded and presented the survey.

I have a friend who is actually a shopaholic and has real issues with books.  He has thousands of books only a fraction of which he has read.  My brother also has at least 2,000 but that is mostly because he never disposes of or returns books.. he just fills more closets with stuff.  You have other people who donate their childrens books as soon as they are done with them and with kids you have a variance of a hundred between the packrats and the donators right there.  Add Geekophiles like myself and you could easily have a person with a few hundred no longer applicable books.
I never did actually answer with a number.  I have more than a hundred and less than a thousand.  Probably around 400 but I plan on getting rid of a lot of these in the not too distant future. Once I have read a Fictional Novel it is pretty rare for me to re-read it and I favor paperbacks which look ugly on a bookshelf, putting novels on a bookshelf and not reading them is pretentious, putting them in a closet is lazy, and finding someone who wants them is something that I always imagine I will do but don't.

Thanks for all your input and personal comments.

In the end what I think I will have to do is to commission some research, since it seems clear that the answers aren't alread out there!

Thanks again

Iain

Iain,

I think it's time to close this question.

Patrick

We have about 100-200 books.  Mostly my engineering course books, my wifes cookbooks and a few read recreation books

Well in the end I had to find out myself, so I don't suppose this is really an excellent experience

Thanks for the feedback Iain. Congratulations on finding your results. EE is a very good place to ask a wide variety of questions, but unfortunately nobody was very strong on how many books people own.
Again, thanks for posting to let us know.