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!