how much money did I spend on books in 2020? and is this a haul?

hello friends my name is marines and this has been a big year for talking about consumerism in the booktube community as i always say when i chime in i think that this is probably going to be a perpetual conversation because of the very nature of what we do and i'm not even talking about like halls or unhauls or any one specific kind of content but just like reading as a hobby and what that means and how in order to do this hobby we have to be able to obtain books in some way i think part of the problem when we do have this conversation is that tendency to paint booktube in one large broad stroke when that very thing how we access books and our means to obtain books varies so so much from person to person in the booktube community that said i think we also tend to focus too much on that on the access of it and not on the other portion of it which is just like how we talk about consumerism how we present it especially as people who have channels who have platforms and what the community says to others viewers and people who would like to join and and even those of us participating what it says to us about consumerism and the fact that a lot of us have gone through a period of when we joined booktube we end up buying a bunch of books like that says something i think about the structure and the nature of this community and it's something that a lot of people don't like to engage with they just kind of want to stop with this is a personal choice this is my money i can do whatever i want and and the conversation there when whenever you're participating in a community i think that there are bigger conversations to have but i've talked about this plenty on my twitter i've got videos up about it on my channel i wanted to address it almost on a smaller scale as well 2020 was a big year for me personally about coming to terms with a lot of this because i ended up spending a whole lot more time inside of my house than i originally planned and that made me really come face to face with my collection and the way that it had grown over my time here on booktube and not only had it grown just like in numbers but it had grown into something that i personally wasn't very happy with when i started my collection it had always been about obtaining books that i had read and loved and wanted to own a physical copy of and then enter this year when i owned all of these books that i hadn't even read so not only did i make my way through my collection decide what things i wanted to keep all of the books that you see behind me for the most part are books that i've read and loved unless they're part of like a classics collection but it also made me think about how i obtain books and how i want to obtain books the best part is that i came to all of these conclusions and i was doing all of this thinking in 2020 which was the weirdest year i did not track any of my reading in a normal way my spending was not normal but i still kind of want to reflect back on what actually happened in 2020 so that i can bring these lessons and this as a baseline into 2021 plus i thought that transparency would probably be interesting for you guys i don't know i went back and forth about whether or not i would make this video like i had the idea i did all the prep work but then i was like is this weird and then i asked twitter and twitter was like it's not weird most people said it wasn't weird okay i promise i'm going to jump into this but a little more preamble and some baseline things first is that i am 34 years old and the situation that i am in right now has not always been my situation and it wasn't even my situation when i joined booktube those years ago so i have 15 years of work experience and have eight years of professional experience in my field so i have a good job and i make a pretty good salary even though i do live alone and i live in a fairly expensive city in south florida that said i've got disposable income available to me to spend on books mostly in 2020 was weird i was unemployed for four months in 2020 i started the year off in the job that i had been at for nearly four years they laid me off it took me four months to find another job which was a relatively quick bounce back and i'm super lucky that that happened that way it was a really stressful four months and it really tightened up my spending and changed my budget in ways again i had no idea because 2020 caught us all by surprise so my reading for 2020 isn't over i'm one of those people that reads up until like december 31st 11 59 p.m but i suspect that i will end the year at around 100 books read i think that's another important thing to take into consideration because as you hear about how many books that i brought in this year it's also good to know that i read a hundred books overall okay so for real how much money did i spend on books this year we'll start with memberships i've had an audible subscription for a portion of this year i have the membership that allows you one credit a month and then i was also subscribed to audible escape which was their program for romance books where you could basically check out an unlimited number of books within that catalog they discontinued that and i also cancelled this for a portion of the year both of these things when i lost my job because again i was trying to tighten up on spending in total i spent 198 dollars and 21 cents on audible credits and subscriptions and i listened to 61 books through audible this year sometimes i was mixing up listening to the audiobook with reading the physical book or something of that nature and a lot of this just accounts for that audible escape subscription and how much romance that i was reading through there some of these romances are things that i don't even necessarily mark as read or talk about because i'm just like binging my way through them so that like 61 books that's kind of amazing the math works out so that that was essentially three dollars and 25 cents per book i also have a book of the month subscription i didn't actually end up pausing or canceling this one because they didn't let me do it online and this was during a time when i was having trouble functioning these are all of the books that i obtained through book of the month the silent patient by alex mckelde's this was sent to me for free as part of their they have a book of the year that they choose every year and if you are part of their bff program which from what i gather it's just i don't know being with them for a long time they send you one of their books of the year for free so i chose this one and i haven't read it the sundown motel by simone st james which i have started but have not finished things in jars by jess kidd these were all in january so i got one free one with a credit and one as an add-on for 9.99 in february i got anna k which i have not read yet in march i got the two lives of lydia bird which i have not read yet in april i got beat read by emily henry which i did read this year in may i got the boyfriend project by farah rashon which i have not read yet in june i got one to watch by kate stayman london which i did read this year in july i got big friendship by amina tussoe and ann friedman which i also read in august i got the space between worlds by mikaya johnson which i have read in september i got cased by isabelle wilkerson which i have not read yet and they also sent me a book for free for my birthday so i got transcending kingdom by jessie which i have read in october i got the invisible life of addie larue by b.e schwab which i have read in november i got this time next year by sophie cousins which i have not read yet and in december i got in a holidays by christina lauren which i have read and i did an additional add-on for 9.99 and i got the office of historical corrections by danielle evans which i am in the middle of reading so that is 16 books in total including add-ons and the ones that they sent me for free which totals out to 11.55 cents per book moving on to ebooks i spent 177.45 on 18 ebooks averaging to 9.85 per ebook this was the one where i like did the math and i was like honestly glad that i was seeing it because this feels like too much to me the worst part of it is that like for my books of the month that was like about half and half i think of books that i had read versus not read for my ebooks i read five of the 18 ebooks that i purchased and the reason that like the price per book is kind of skewed rather high is that a lot of those were either new releases that i swore i had to have that moment or they were non-fiction books that i wanted to have a copy of and so those tend to be a little bit more expensive but i was getting these thinking i'm going to read these and i only read 5 of those 18. one of the things that i think i really want to work on in 2021 is spending zero dollars on ebooks if my library doesn't have it like i don't need it obviously i just i don't need it and finally moving on to the physical books that i purchased in 2020 usually what i do is when i read a book that is not in a physical format that i loved and i want to own a physical copy of that book as part of my collection because i want to reread it because i want to mark it up for whatever reason i put it on a wish list so i can track it that way and i try to slowly buy those books so that i can own them and add them to my collection so i've got 13 of those books books that i read and loved and wanted to own my own copy of first up we were eight years in power by ta-nehisi coates next you never forget your first a biography of george washington by alexis co we are not from here by jenny torres sanchez the glass hotel by emily st john mendel afterlife by julia alvarez so you want to talk about race by aj oma aloo son of a trickster by eden robinson a heart and a body in the world by deb coletti sorcery of thorns by margaret rodgerson and a kata witch by nettie okorafor that leaves an additional four books that i bought and i hadn't read yet and i still haven't read yet one is a kata warrior by nadia okorafor i just bought the second part of the series because i i enjoyed the first one enough that i was like i'm definitely gonna read the second part and like i definitely am i just haven't yet next i have the beautiful ones an untamed shore by sylvia morena garcia some of her books are more difficult to obtain than others especially the earlier ones and a lot of them are getting reprints now i'm working on reading all of her books i'd like to do a video about her work in general so i got these two copies right at the beginning of the year before everything happened and i was still like bright shiny and new and really excited about like projects and stuff so i've got these two books that i will also definitely read they're from one of my favorite authors but i just haven't yet and crescent city by sarah j maas which i did a whole video about why i have this book and i was like i'm reading it and i actually did start it i just haven't finished in total on those 17 books i spent 257.84 which works out to just over 15 per book all of the other books that i'm reading come primarily from the library whether those are ebooks or audiobooks i haven't been to a physical library all year but i'm very lucky to belong to a system that uses overdrive and i can still borrow these materials through that platform and also this year i was lucky enough to join librofm's advanced listener copy program so every month i can pick one two or three free audiobook copies and i've read a ton of audiobooks through libro fm this year and then occasionally i will also get books free books from the publishers so those are all free resources that i also have at my disposal that accounts for a portion of my reading if my math is correct in total that is 818.37 that i spent this year i have a feeling that i am probably forgetting something and also like maybe my math is not correct like the math that i did while sitting on the couch and like scrolling through past orders so let's say i round this way up and say i spent nine hundred dollars on books this year that works out to be about seventy five dollars per month which nine hundred dollars is not a number that sounds happy to me but 75 dollars per month is like more like it fits a little bit better in my head this is in no way meant to be like a flex of any sort i also realized that while i was putting this together that i don't have like a lot of information about what sort of the average is or what the norm is i guess if there is such a thing in booktube so i don't know like you're maybe you're hearing that i spent 900 and you're like are you kidding that's a ton or you're hearing that and you're like i spent that in a few months i don't know i don't know where this lands but 75 dollars per month on a book habit looking into the new year in terms of a budget a few things so first is that audible escape is gone and so i won't be spending that money on audible escape anymore and then it really makes me kind of think about if i want to be spending this money on audible in the first place i read books from there but now i have libro fm which was introduced to me this year so i'm not sure like in my head i'm like can i do this like swap out libro fm completely for audible i just kind of want to take a look at the subscriptions on both ends and what i'm ultimately getting from the alc program versus what i ended up listening to this year on audible like the whole amazon thing is just like a whole other conversation i understand that they are an evil corporation and yet especially for like romance books and things like i can't completely quit them so there's work to be done there all i know is that i will definitely be spending less on audible in 2021. i'm not buying ebooks in 2021 she says hopefully my one big exception is that if i need a book for a book club and like an ebook like purchasing an ebook is the only way that i can get it in time that will be my exception i bought so many less ebooks this year i feel like than i ever have and what this is teaching me is that my library is enough and not only is it enough it's better for me if i borrow something from the library and then don't read it that's fine if i buy a nine dollar e-book and don't read it that's nine dollars so i just need to quit completely with buying ebooks it is not the format for me in terms of spending money i'm really happy with my book of the month subscription i feel like the books that i get even though i'm like a little bit behind here and trying to be more mindful about reading the things that i get they're curated in such a way that for the most part i think the lowest i've ever given a book of the month book that i've read was three stars so i'm really happy with the way that they curate and and the things that they choose and what i ultimately choose from book of the month i want to be a little bit more careful about some of the things that i'm choosing because last year and in previous years i was choosing a lot of thrillers because the descriptions were the ones drawing my eyes but i don't read that many thrillers so i ended up with a bunch of unread thrillers so i'm trying to be more mindful of that but in general i'm going to keep my book of the month subscription and i'm doing rather well in terms of only buying physical books that i've read and loved so more of that i did buy those four books that i didn't read and haven't read yet so if i can get that down to zero that's like ideal but four i'm not mad about it either that's it for me today let me know if this was interesting or helpful at all if you track your spending on books and how you track it and if you set a budget for your spending year over year i'd love to talk to you guys about all of that down in the comments i think this is the only sort of wrap up video for 2020 that i will do in december i will do the rest of my wrapping up in january because again i will be reading to the very last second of december 31st so you can expect more content like this next month thank you so much for watching this video and i will see you guys soon there's this great tick tock about like looking out your window for your amazon package but the the sound is you can't keep doing this to me

Channel: mynameismarines

Views: 3,540

Rating: 4.9727893 out of 5

Keywords: booktube, book haul

Id: OqaXK31jXqA

Length: 16min 17sec (977 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 25 2020