Let’s Talk Bookish is a monthly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s recently moved to this lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here. I’m posting a day early since I have a Book Blogger Hop post and a review for tomorrow!
September’s prompt is about decluttering ebooks and physical books:
How do you manage your digital library (Kindle, Kobo, etc.)—do you delete books you won’t read, or do you let them pile up? Do you feel less guilty about owning too many digital books versus physical ones? Which is harder to let go of: a well-loved physical book or a purchased e-book?
My physical library is reasonably well-curated. I have a backlog from years prior to 2025, but in 2025 I came up with a method that kept me reading the majority of the books I’d bought, and I’ve always got rid of books I knew I wouldn’t read again (sometimes by donating them to the local library, sometimes by donating them to charity shops, sometimes by selling them via programs like World of Books). People regularly think of me as a weird hoarder of books and it’s the silliest accusation, because boxes of books depart the household pretty much monthly. I only keep books I expect I’ll want to reread.
When it comes to my digital books, though, I do pretty much no curation at all. I just trust to the storage space on my Kobo that I have plenty, and never delete books. When ereaders had smaller amounts of memory, I had to shuffle things a lot more (though my approach tended to be “expand the memory if possible”, which used to be possible with Kobo Minis: I had a special set of tiny screwdrivers to get in, and copied the original SD card onto bigger SD cards for several of my friends, ahaha).
I know when I first had an ereader, a Sony, I organised things obsessively into folders, in part to help with browsing since it was a bit of a weird system with a lot of different buttons and no touch screen (I was an early adopter!)… but again, nope, now I just tend to use the search to pull up the book I want, or filter by “Kobo Plus” to see the books I’ve added from my Kobo Plus subscription to pick something from there. Sometimes the randomness of the sort is what sparks the urge to read a particular book, even!
I feel maybe a little guilty about books that I totally forget about in the depths of my Kobo, but I don’t feel guilty about having plenty of books at all, neither physical nor digital. It’s a joy! I’m very privileged to have such access to books and ability to keep a lot of books around me, and sometimes I’ll feel bad about not getting to a specific book I planned to read sooner or something like that, but in general, nah, no guilt or shame about books.
So yeah… in summary, I think this might be surprising to people who know how generally organised I like to be, but… I’m a gremlin when it comes to my digital library. Oops!
I tend to keep a very firm grip on both my physical and digital collections. Just yesterday I culled all the books in all the places and feel so much better for it.
Kyles recently posted…Monthly Bookish Wrap Up – August 2026
I think for me it doesn’t help that I’ve switched between ecosystems a few times and have a lot of books to sideload as well, so it feels fairly unsurmountable!
I did a little e-reader decluttering recently, in my efforts to try to fix my e-reader without needing to reset, and also so when I set up the “broken” e-reader I got for free, it wouldn’t sync up and fill with loads of books I’m no longer interested in. So now I have “my” e-reader that is still an over-stuffed mess in need of a factory reset, but all the books I read for review or stream go on the “broken” one (this is also helpful since that one handles Project Gutenberg’s sometimes disastrously coded epubs better).
I still regret parting with a few books when I last moved, because they weren’t nice editions and I can get them either from PG, or I thought it would be easy to find different editions in a used bookstore, but I’m in the wrong city for that…
HarpGriffin recently posted…A book involving something you wish you could do or gotten to do
I should possibly attend to my digital libraries a bit, but given the totality is scattered across different ebook ecosystems and sideloaded books, it just feels like a mess I’d rather pretend isn’t there, ahaha.
E-readers nowadays have such a lot of memory space (compared to how small the individual book file sizes are) that I don’t really see the need to curate my e-book collection by deleting things. I do have my books organised into collections on my Kindle, but some of those collections are large enough now that they’re probably actually not helping when I want to find something, so I have to search anyway on occasion!
Gem @ Gem’s Book Talk recently posted…Birthstone Book Covers – September 2026
Exactly, there’s so much space I don’t see needing to sort through it as very urgent. Also I’m normally home and able to connect to the Kobo Store to download anything that’s missing, etc.
You’re definitely not alone there because I’m a total chaos monster when it comes to my digital library. It’s mostly due to being overwhelming (lol) but also, I don’t find the interface good enough to spend all the time and effort to organize. The search button is my saviour, lol. I wish it was easier to give away or sell books here, but I try to at least sort my books out once a year (every month is amazing)! It’s hard to say bye to books though and I defo think I’m a dragon when it comes to my books
Dini @ dinipandareads recently posted…Let’s Talk Bookish: Digital vs Physical Decluttering
Yeah, the interface is definitely a problem. Maybe if I could do something about it on my PC and have it sync (I’ve never checked). It feels too fiddly on the ereader!
There’s little reason to declutter the digital books, but there are times I wish I could organize them better. It’s lovely that you often donate your physical books.
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Yeah, for me a large part of it is that there’s little reason to do it. There are better ways to spend my time!
Oh, I love how much movement there is in your library, it really helps make sure your library reflects your tastes well and shares the wealth! I donate books as well, usually to the library shop near me. It sounds like the newer Kobo that you have makes it easy to be a gremlin since you can access the books relatively easily and I do enjoy that the randomness can inspire you to pick up a book, that’s fun! 🙂
Hahaha, I do have a lot (a lot!) of long-term unread books too, but I’m working on it!