A few years ago, my wife and I owned roughly over 500 books in paperback and hardcover. Here they were, in a condo in Toronto:

When my wife and I moved to Hong Kong, I figured I’d be back in six months and we packed these books up. They were, by far, the most difficult category of item to move; heavy, required lots of packing, etc. We stored them away in my parents’ basement. We stayed in Hong Kong over a year.

Then I got a job in New York City, where we stayed for over two years. The books remained in my parents basement.

During these years, I started buying ebooks on my Amazon Kindle. I had been against this for a long time, partly because I loved the analog feel of print books, and partly because I wanted to properly own my books and knew the risks of ebooks.  

Last year, when we returned to Toronto, we realized we wanted to continue living downtown. That meant we’d be moving again, maybe more than once in the next few years. Lugging these hundreds of books everywhere would make moving much more painful. 

City life also meant less space, which also meant that we’d need to dedicate at least an entire wall to the shelves. It also meant we’d need more shelves for when we bought more new books. 

We made the difficult decision to donate half of the books to the library. It was a painful process, with a light sense of grief. The only consolation was hopefully these books would end up with more people who needed them instead of on our shelves.

Ownership requires a lot of energy, as well as space for storage. We still own a fair amount of books—maybe half of what we had—and we buy print very intentionally, but the rest of our library is digital.