Bookkeeping
In news sure to horrify librarians across the nation, it turns out that some 29% of Americans are letting their bookshelves descend into chaos, with no set system for organizing their collections whatsoever.
That’s according to a new survey from YouGov about book ownership and arranging, which also revealed that 22% of US adults are splitting their shelves by genre or subject, 20% are sorting by size, and 19% are adopting an alphabetical system based on titles or the author’s name. Interestingly, the sometimes-maligned (though social media-friendly) practice of color coding collections is the least popular method, with just 3% of Americans opting for the purely aesthetic approach.
Shelf care
When it comes to getting our tomes in order, the size of the collections in question often makes a big difference. Indeed, the practice of doing nothing to organize your books is only the most popular up to a point, with organization by genre/subject winning for readers with over 100 books in their collection, capping out at a whopping 45% share for readers with 1,000+ books in their personal libraries.
However, as we increasingly turn to electronic or audiobooks, as well as AI products that promise to turn titles into chatbots that you can talk to and learn from, who knows how much longer even the most voracious readers will fret over how best to sort their Shakespeares from their Sapiens.
