This quote from Black Swan has been very helpful in allowing me to justify my compulsive book buying:
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."
Great quote. Black Swan happens to be one of my unread books. You've propted me to pick it back up.
More generally, I feel there's no reason to buy books before I need to read them. Effectively Amazon has become my library. Need a book - $10 and you can pull it off the shelf and into your Kindle.
This saves my back when moving too. I have about 650 books in my Kindle library. 90% read in entirety. Moving those would suck!
I buy way more books than I ever read. In a moment of insight one day it occurred to me that when I was contemplating buying a book, it wasn't the book I was after it was the knowledge contained within, and actually just buying the book wasn't enough to give me what I needed. I then realised that I would actually have to read it. So I wasn't just paying for it with money, I was paying with time. Quite often time that I couldn't afford.
I still have too many unread books on my bookshelf, but this has helped me temper my obsession a bit. Now if only I could buy some more time..
I friend of mine, alternative spectrum publisher for 40 years, found a pretty good solution: For every book he buys, he has to get rid off another one. Literally: One book into his library, one book out.
His motivation was that he simply did not have any more space for books in his house and his SO made up this rule. When I was about 20 (already owning more than 5000 books that I had paid for with my own money) I tried to apply it. A miracle happened: After a few weeks I realized that it was not just about some arbitrary "equilibrium of books" in my bookshelf. What I did realize instead: I could not decide which book to get rid off because I could not even remember most of them! A few years later I moved out of my apartment/the country/the continent and just gave away all books I did not instantaneously decide to keep.
Ever since I stopped the compulsory book buying thing and only buy those I desperately want to read now. If I don't have time right now, it goes on a list of book to buy (compared to the list of books bought to read). Result: I read 100% of the books I buy.
EDIT: And of those I read, most go to public libraries when I am done, the few books I really, really want to keep (well, in storage in my home country/continent) fill 2 boxes. The rest of them, I can buy again when I really need them.
I have far too many as well. An interesting motivating math experiment is to do the math on how much free time you have and how long it takes you to read an average book to compute how many you can read before you die. It's a frighteningly small number, at least for me.
I recently tried the Abaris life expectancy app and was pleasantly surprised when they estimated I will live to be 96 years old. Even if they are off by 10 years, it's still pretty good. Assuming the last 5 years are a wash due to dementia, I still have many years left to get to all my books.
I would try the app if I were you. I always thought it was more like the late 70s. Maybe we will all have more time than we think! Makes burning a few years on a startup now also seem like an ok idea. Life is long, for many of us - according to the actuaries.
I got over my bibliomania by pretty much completely stopping to buy books online. I never used to buy book at airports, train stations, book stores. Almost always online and a lot. Just because it was on offer and/or it was reviewed well or was rated good. So whenever I would go on a journey I would pick a couple from my hoard.
Couple of years later I have a huge collection of unread books. I may not read a lot of them ever. And probably no one will read them. I have the option of either giving it to a public library or leave in the family in the hope that someone will get to read them someday.
I had also stopped getting books based on my own taste. It was always someone's review or so or genre search or famous works.
So now I buy a book when I want to read it. Be it airport, or a train station or a book store. I buy it if I like it - at MRP or whatever the price is. I would just go through the beginning of the book, or few pages from here and there. In this way - I spend less and read more books. I also discover a lot of books that I wouldn't have otherwise. It also is very close to what I think I can call my own taste. Only that I buy less books which I don't mind really.
The "preview" function on Google Play Books has saved me a lot of money. I now add things to my library on impulse and only buy them if I reach the end of the preview, which is a very effective mechanism for separating the aspirational reads from the real ones.
Argh. I have this pretty bad. Currently sitting on 254 kindle books and we hard paper books.
I have thought a lot about what I have spent and keep spending on books, and my conclusion/justification is:
1. I had to teach myself programming now running a company which has required quit a lot of knowledge which is spread among technical/business/people. The best way for me to gain deep knowledge is to read a book on whatever I need since experts or mentors are hard to come by in my part of town. Books are my education.
2. I really don't have a lot of friends, rarely go out and only watch a few shows so books are my gateway and I can justify the expense that way too.
3. I have very varied interests so I just completed re-reading All Quite on the Western Front, now on Deng Xiaoping of China with some Terry Pratchett to spice things up - I can comfortably justify the cost on just that on the moment engagement on whatever mood am in.
4.At about $11 per book average, 254 books bought in past 3 years. It works out to 2794 or about $80 on books per month...I routinely spend a lot more on worse/forgettable stuff. My books are top up there in terms of best and most tangible things I have done with funds. Put another way, would I have done something better with that $2700? Nothing that I haven't still managed to do with books making me all the better for it.
Finally, I am happy with the actual number of books because it ensures I can always find something that speaks to me in whatever mood and some general frameworks for most business/work situations I come up.
Now if some book could tell me why am here justifying my book habit ;)
> I had to teach myself programming now running a company which has required quit a lot of knowledge which is spread among technical/business/people.
I feel like I'm headed down a similar path myself. Do you have any recommendations for books relating to this? I'm certainly not asking for a huge curated list, but perhaps the top 5 you found most influential would be much appreciated. Thanks.
When I buy a book I do so for the possibilities that it opens to gather more knowledge and understating of the world. So it feels good to buy the books even if I'm not sure that I'm going to read them any time soon. There has been so many books in my bookshelf for years, even over a decade, that I just end reading later that it doesn't bother me too much. I will read them eventually. I buy what I find interesting, I read them in the order I had mood to.
Probably the exception to this rule are professional books. If I buy a book about a new technology that we are investigating at work, or I'm want to improve my management skills I will read it immediately. But in this concrete cases the feeling of awe is superseded by the requirements of the moment.
At a personal level, it seems to me that this phenomenon could be applied to e-books as well. I have hundreds of kindle books I bought from amazon which aren't read yet. This is how it happens. You see a book, and you want it in your library and you imagine one day you'll get the time to enjoy it, but that day never arrives.
The proliferation of book recommendation systems and the websites which create lists of "To read" books are to be blamed as well. Maybe not. One thing author talks about: preserving books for the next generation, that doesn't apply to e-books either in the physical.
I used to have over 3,000 books. Many of them I acquired when I worked at a used book store which gave me 50% off the already really cheap books, and when they made me their book buyer, so I'd go to all sorts of book fairs, garage sales, flea markets, and estate sales to ferret out great books (this was before amazon and ebay) and also buy some for myself. The problem was that my appetite for reading books was not nearly equal to my capacity for buying them.
I wound up putting my thousands of books in to storage for years, then going to the trouble and expense of driving or mailing them all from state to state as I moved around, even across the country multiple times, and then across the Atlantic ocean back and forth.
Eventually, I bit my lip and sold all but a few hundred of the best books, as I couldn't part with those. But I still only read a tiny fraction. They were great to have as reference and for the occasional times when I would be in the mood to read them, but most of the time they sat unused.
Finally, I decided to sell the remainder, as I didn't want to move them across the country, where I was moving for a job, yet one more time. Unfortunately, by then most used book stores in the area had long since closed, and selling the books a little at a time through ebay was far more trouble than it was worth. Worse, the one serious used book store in the area bought books for 10 times less than the cheap prices they sold them for (as opposed to the 3x or 4x markup in the good old days when there were a lot of used book stores and people actually bought books). It wasn't even worth selling to them, and I wound up just donating a lot of my books to the university and unfortunately throwing out some others, and still a hundred or two left over are still in storage.
I've long since stopped trying to buy books, and get them from the library as much as possible. This worked when I lived next to some really good public libraries, but now it's harder, so I'm starting to accumulate a small collection once again.
Impressive! I had a little over 2,000 books years ago. I got mine in a similar way, I'd purchase lots of books on ebay for < 1.00 a book, and would go to those used book stores and trade them in (2 for 1) for books I wanted. I did this between the ages of 19 and 25 or so, at which point I went away to college and didn't want to move them with me so I donated some to a friend and some to a library.
I just packed my books into moving boxes. Over the years I've hoarded so many books on math, physics, computer graphics and guess what.. yeah never read them. Never had the time nor the brain capacity. Oh well, I can guess I can sell them on amazon.
There are several sites, including Amazon, that will directly buy back your used books. You can enter the ISBN and they will tell you how much they will give you for it.
I would make packages with the ones that are said to have some value, and donate the rest. We have local services here that will take used books and send them to where they are more needed or put them in open booths at parks, maybe you have the same.
Good way to declutter the house if you have switched to e-books. Some of the technical or scientific thick volumes were a pretty good deal.
I take great pleasure in finally starting a book that's been on my shelf for a while. I have fallen back into the (bad) habit of buying books too frequently now (a decent chunk of them after a recommendation on HN...)
Major personal problem. Got much worse once I could one-click purchase straight into my kindle. I churn through a lot (~20 to 30 books a year?!) but buy even more!
Instead of straight buying a book I just send the preview to my (main) kindle. So if I really end up reading the book it's just one click to buy it when I reach the end of the preview.
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."