why i stopped buying new books

At the beginning of last year, if you tell me I'm limiting/resisting myself from buying books, I would have laughed. Me? Someone who really love going to bookstores and browsing titles? Solid no. Because back then: going to a bookstore means buying a multiple books (might as well, right?). As time passes by, though, I get increasingly aware of the all the things I'm hoarding - not just books but in this blog post, I'll focus on books. That's when I decided to only keep the books that I loved. I tend to be sentimental so it is hard for me to part with books but although it's tough, I gave away books from my shelf that I didn't really liked. I bought myself a Kindle sometime last year because of this. It is mostly cheaper buying an eBook and if I ended up not liking it, I'll just remove it from my account.

I have also decided to only buy books that I think I will love. It is definitely a hit or miss because you never really know if you'll like a book until after you read it. For the books that I'm on the fence about, I'll just opt on buying the eBook and if I love it, I'd most likely buy a physical copy - this does not happen often though. My self-imposed Instagram detox (mostly bookstagram) really helped cut my impulses of buying popular books that I know I don't really like. Bookstagram, despite being an awesome community for book lovers, kind of glamorizes buying more books than one can read. Looking back, I was once envious of people who have the latest and popular books (FOMO, anyone?). Then I realized that I don't have to read or buy a book just because it's the talk of the 'gram. I also ditched my auto-buy author (stuff?) this year because, not gonna lie, there are genres and/or age categories that my favorite authors write that I really don't read (i.e. middle grade). I also don't buy books just because of the cover anymore - I stopped doing that years ago. I appreciate when a book has a gorgeous cover but that doesn't mean I'll buy one just because I like the aesthetics of it.

So before buying a book, I ask myself this two questions:

1. Did I really like the synopsis?
2. Will I read this in six months time?

If I answer no to any of the two, then I won't buy it. This goes for both digital (eBook) and physical books. Honestly, this is not as hard as I thought it would be. It definitely helped that I was also saving money.

Anyway, I feel like I've gone off a few tangents here and there but the main point is: I don't buy books (or anything for that matter) just for the sake of buying one anymore. If it is an impulse buy, it will most likely only end up in tbr pile a.k.a. pile-you-won't-be-looking-at-again or at least this is the case for me. This shouldn't be the case, for me or for anyone, as books should be for reading.

ps: I've been writing this post for almost six months and I feel like I've been talking in circles. There's just so many I want to talk about but I think it's not relevant to what I want to say about this topic.
pps: I wrote the draft for this back in October and I was in such a bad head space that I wasn’t able to post this lol.