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A lot of people own books that they want but don't actually have any reason for wanting beyond the fact that it is a book.
A lot of people will say "I can't stand the thought of throwing away a book" which is as silly as "I can't stand the thought of throwing away a newspaper."
Part of it is that a lot of people have a very misguided sense of how rare books are. That they are difficult to replace or to find another copy if you ever need to look something up. They think all first editions are valuable and that a "limited edition" of 5000 is a rarity (if they made more than 500 it isn't rare and at 500 it isn't likely to be valuable). They also tend to overestimate how often they actually reread books or use them as reference materials. For most people with thousands of books, if you put them in boxes and kept them out if used for any reason, 95% would still be in the boxes 20 years later.
I saw many people come into that shop to liquidate their holdings (usually because they had to move into smaller housing) and be crushed when they found out that their "collection" was pretty much worthless, not so much that is wasn't worth any money but the realization that the books they thought so important really aren't.
I'm not saying anybody here has too many books, I certainly wouldn't know, but just like any other fetish, book fetishes can be damaging when they get out of control.
(And being a non-practicing librarian this comes up for me a lot because people think being a librarian is about books and will therefore be impressed that they still have every scrap of bound paper that ever came in their front door, when it has **** all to do with books. Books are just a medium for information; when they become valuable as artifacts then they're the realm of curators and archivists.)
Anyway, hot topic buttons pressed. I too have lots of books and each has a reason for being in the house, be it informational, artifactual, or emotional (except Lani's, her Patricia Cornwell paperbacks violate every retention guideline I have). But a lot of people just accumulate.
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