My wife and I have a collection of several hundred physical books, and while the size of our collection is unusual among our friends, nearly all of them have a collection of some size, even if it’s just in the 10-20 book range. Pretty much everyone I know has at least one category of books they prefer printed, often textbooks and cookbooks, even if they generally use ebooks. We’re in Austin, currently, so we don’t have the mold problem you mention, but I grew up in coastal Mississippi and New Orleans and never had that problem unless the books were stored out in a shed or something. Several of our physical books are ~200 years old, and while I understand that an ebook will conceivably live for that long, I am suspicious that it would remain useful, given changing devices, formats, publishers, etc.
Anecdotally I see a strong clustering. I have friends with a ton of books, and their other friends also heavily liking books and physical goods (CDs, cards etc.) in general.
My other friends tend to have basically nothing in terms of physical books, music, movies.
I’d wager it depends on how people see physical goods in general: is it an asset or a liability ? And the “minimalist” switch might become more and more attractive when people prefer to rent instead of going into debt.
