How many bookcases are there in your home?

Years ago I used to always buy a book when going through the airport on a long trip, but as you say no more.  Seattle has a good public library system, including a fair number of electronic copies that can be checked out.  When I was still travelling quite a bit I would load up books up on my iPad from the library before getting to the airport.

I'm the same way.  I've tried pen pads and touch pads but nothing beats a 0.7mm mechanical pencil for quick notes and a set of colored wooden pencils for sketches.

I think I must have bought the 'frameless' version...

I made the big mistake of buying 800mm wide bookshelves. They just collapse under the weight and leave your collection of books looking like a collapsed jenga puzzle.

I'm not quite sure if my home or my office has the greater storage problem at the moment, I'd say that they are probably on a par with one another. I think the previous occupants must have taken most of the floor with them when they moved out as I can't seem to find it.

Great questions as these are all things that have changed over that past few decades.

I have six bookcases in my house.  I currently have more books in boxes that I have on the shelves of these bookcases (mostly outdated books).  I have purged even more boxes over the past 10 years.  My wife is an avid reader, and most of the shelf space contain her books.  I have an overflowing bookcase in my office, but I find that many of these books have lost their usefulness as they too are becoming dated.  That said, there are several books that I continue to reference and there are several titles that I have been temped to add to my collection.  For years, I have bought mostly used books (ebay and amazon) to help keep the cost down as I added more titles to my technical library.

While working, I was frequently changing jobs and constantly found myself having to bootstrap my knowledge while taking on new and interesting challenge.   This is where I would rely on books to allow me to quickly come up to speed on a new subject.  More and more, I find myself relying on online tutorials when I want to learn new technologies and one of my best sources has been element14.  The quality and quantity of content here is really amazing.  Some of the contributors here have been quite voluminous in their contributions.

I too would almost always pick up a book on any trip through an airport, but lately the number of titles and the quality of those has been diminishing rapidly.  Recently, while on a trip and while visiting multiple airports and multiple shops, the selections were limited and almost identical in all of the shops.  Highly disappointing.  Also, I noticed recently that I have greatly reduced the number of books that I do read (and I have been a voracious reader in the past).  It seems that most of my reading was done as a way to escape my daily grinds (work and such), but now that I am retired, I have nothing to escape.  Lately I have been more interested in living my life than reading, as my level of enjoyment has been so high.

Radio is still in my life, but mostly as a news source (NPR).  Unfortunately I have not been able to find a good music station (alternative rock) here in Texas.  While I don't put my hands on an actual newspaper, I do subscribe and read digitally everyday.  The internet and the computer are my main sources of internet content, although I do enjoy quite a few videos on my smartphone (mostly wood/metal working and other crafting and restoration projects).  And with such a capable smartphone I have long ago given up on having a landline (although my modem/router does support this feature).

Three.

In the living/sitting room are books around the fireplace that I think guests might enjoy. It's a mix of fiction and non-fiction. For me, I have read most of these as either Kindle or Audiobook and then bought a paper copy.

The shelf in the office has reference books like old textbooks and stuff I look up while writing. In most cases, I use Internet searches for stuff I could look up in these references. But, sometimes, it's nice to flip through something like the Art of Electronics while refreshing my memory.

And last, in the lab, I keep all of my vintage computer books. Owner's manuals, repair guides, and reference books of the period. I have PDFs or Archive.org bookmarks for all of these. I have paper versions for nostalgia reasons.

These days, I value paper and digital versions of books for different reasons. (In the past, when I traveled a lot, digital books were my only method.)