On romanticism: I guess I was being too harsh. My point was that it doesn't really make any practical or economic sense for me to romanticize about books, but I can't help it anyway. (Which now seems self evident when you point out the definition of romanticism like that.)
Interesting about the environmental aspect. What about all the waste though? I guess it gets recycled eventually.
I buy about 20-30 books per year and probably 100 rolls of toilet paper. If you haven't stopped using toilet paper, I wouldn't worry about your library. Not buying books for environmental reasons is for the overwhelming majority of lifestyles optimizing in the wrong place.
It's rare for a person to read more than a couple thousand books in a lifetime. That's under 2 cubic meters of space total. That's massively dwarfed by the amount of waste that we generate in a lifetime. I'd need about 3 years worth of books to fill up a trash bag.
Interesting about the environmental aspect. What about all the waste though? I guess it gets recycled eventually.