Anyone else read this entire thread and realize what a fascinating look into each of our psyches it is? Why do we collect?

I, like Snappleshacks, am in it for the X-Men. I'm a huge fan of a lot of Marvel properties, but the X-Men material is the only stuff I'm ever likely to re-read in the future, so it's the only one I feel the need to own.

I started collecting collections about 8 years ago, buying MMWs of the older material and trades of all the current story arcs. I found trades great because they were easy to store, looked good on my bookshelf and were reasonably priced. The biggest problem I ran into was that I became so addicted that I wanted to read the stories as they were coming out in floppies, but I still wanted the trades eventually, so the price really started adding up. At the same time I was buying MMWs as I could find and afford them, but at the time some of the key X-Men volumes were out of print. Then 2006 rolled around and Uncanny X-Men Omnibus, Vol. 1 came out and changed my life forever. I decided to switch to this format and sell off all of my X-Men MMWs (I still have The X-Men, Vol. 7 and 8 due to my deep fear that they'll never end up in an Omnibus). It took a while for Marvel to get the output up to a respectable level, but by this time next year there will be at least 5 Omnibuses of classic X-Men material, plus countless OHCs of classic crossovers.

Cut to today: At this point I buy any X-Men OHC of pre-2000 material. The only reason I draw the line there is because that's around when I got back into reading comics after almost a decade of not reading, so I don't consider it to be "classic" by my arbitrary definition of the word. As for trades, I've stopped buying them entirely. They had basically become a cheap way for me to amass reading material and they're resilience to being damaged (unlike floppies) was just a plus. At this point I prefer all of my casual reading material to be digital, so the trades are obsolete. I am probably in the minority for my reasons for collecting the Omnibuses and OHCs, but they're really just so I can have a nice library of something I consider to be classic literature. I look through them often, have read a few of them and greatly enjoy all the bonus content, but I ultimately don't own them as reading material. At this point, if I wanted to re-read one of those runs/stories, I'd be more likely to download scans of it online or just buy it again in the Marvel app. After all, I certainly can't take an Omnibus on the subway!