
Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them - lnguyen
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-44981013
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jason_slack
I have about 500 physical books right now ranging from learning Chinese to
advanced c++ to quantitative finance to Seeet Chi.

My wife hates it. I buy books because I want to. I hope to read them. Someday
I will, I know this. I read a lot already but the implementing what I have
read and practicing takes time away from reading new subject matter. Example
learning Chinese..it’s been 3 years and I still practice daily. Quant stuff..
I’ve been implementing and refining my code but this all takes time away from
th piles of books I have accumulated.

~~~
StavrosK
Is your rate of accumulating books higher than your rate of reading them?

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PakG1
I thought that was the normal way of life for anyone who buys books. It is for
me....

~~~
miceeatnicerice
And very reasonably so. What you want, right, is a two-tier system: a kind of
limbo state for the partially-read, a liberal scattering of them about the
house, where they will healthily compete for your time - some will prove
themselves under these conditions, others will recede into a shameful cupboard
or the basement or wherever - and then a glamorous on-display shelf where your
approved, appreciated selection sits, guilt-free and proud, having floated
upwards due to their superior quality.

If the book churn is too low, any old rubbish makes it to the top.

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Apocryphon
How about having too many tabs that you never get around to closing?

Articles on Instapaper and the like that you never get around to reading?

Side projects that you never finish?

~~~
pvinis
I would definitely add Steam games that are never played.

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cocacola1
I went into Steam and just decided to hide a bunch of those games. Most of
them I got through Humble Bundle. A lot of chaff.

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DocTomoe
> 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.

Nassim Taleb in "The Black Swan" on the value of unread books.

~~~
kaybe
The questions remains, probably, what it means for a book to be 'read'. I'd
posit that that books are only valuable in your possession if you know it -
this specific book - exists, maybe even where exactly in your house if you
have a lot, and you have a basic idea of the contents. So you have to open
them at least once and get a general overview of the index, maybe the
illustrations, maybe even a bit more. Is this book still unread? I'd say truly
unread books are worthless without a search function, which is not yet well
implemented in the physical world.

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pvinis
Any suggestions for solving or improving on this?

I used to have a humble bundle subscription and every month I got like 5 games
on Steam, and played around 2 per year. My solution for this one was to
unsubscribe. Yes, I still see it every now and then and think "Oh would be
cool to play this" but then I remind myself that I would have no time for it.

Another case is started projects or just ideas that never get realized. But no
solution for this. I know I should "just start" and finish small increments
etc, but it doesn't seem to be enough to motivate me, even though I think my
ideas would make for some great useful apps/scripts.

What suggestions does HN have?

~~~
Zyst
For games I just stopped buying anything that I didn't intend to play
instantly.

And I do mean instantly. As soon as I get it, I start playing.

If I don't plan to do that, I don't buy the game until I do.

I now ignore sales completely, and only buy games when I want to play them.

This, surprisingly, actually lowered my game expenditure. But I was getting
into the low 200s in my steam library, and I think I have only run around 30
of those at least once, so it was all really wasteful.

I roughly adapted the same thing to books, I don't buy a new book until I'm
done reading my current book, or decided to drop the book I'm reading.

EDIT: Let me be clear: While I say instantly there's some flexibility. I may
order a game on Amazon Wednesday, get it on Thursday, and start playing on the
weekend. I think instantly may have been the wrong word. More like
immediate/nearest in time.

~~~
vehementi
This is my exact policy as well, for steam games and also now board games
which are wildly harder to play (logistically)

After the recent steam summer sale where I bought nothing I felt like I had
been handed the one ring and passed the test

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kazinator
Toudoku (盗読): the habit of reading free scans of expensive books you never
intend to buy.

Caution: just made that word up; don't spring it cold turkey on your Japanese
friends.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I like this. It's something I enagage in occasionally.

I buy lots of books, sometimes expensive books, but every now and then I find
some $300+ industry handbook that covers my hobby interests and that I would
really love to skim through... LibGen comes to the rescue then.

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m23khan
Sadly, I also engage in bookmarkdoku and browsertabdoku

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kentosi
I think you meant tsunbookmark and tsunbrowsertab :-)

(tsun = piling up, doku = reading, according to the article)

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fb03
doku means POISON. in this case, "addiciton"

sudoku = addicted to numbers (the game)

so bookmarkdoku and etc would be correct ... addicted to bookmarking...

~~~
azdavis
While you are right that 毒 (doku) means 'poison', the Japanese word for
'sudoku' is 数独[1].

数 (su) = number, numeral, digit

独 (doku) = alone, solitary, single

This conveys the idea that the digits may only appear once per {row, column,
box}.

[1]: [https://jisho.org/search/sudoku](https://jisho.org/search/sudoku)

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GW150914
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of dullness, I shall fear
no boredom, for my books are with me. My piles of books, they comfort me. I
prepared a bookshelf in the presence of tedium. I anointed my PS4 with
purchases on sale, my backlogs runneth over.

~~~
paganel
> My piles of books, they comfort me.

Maybe you're just joking, but it often happens to me (at least once a month)
to just sit on my couch and look at the books on my bookshelves, it gives me
peace of mind for a couple of precious moments.

~~~
GW150914
Same here! I’ll do the same thing with audiobooks, and put together a giant
playlist just to see how many hours I could listen to non-stop. For physical
books you get the benefit of the smell and feel of them too. Books are just
the best, for so many reasons. When you have a bunch you haven’t read, you can
look at them and anticipiate the first time you’ll read them, and get that
“Christmas Eve” feel for a minute. Having a lot in my book backlog is
soothing, and conversely I’d get anxious if I felt I was running out of that
backlog.

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pro-library
The value of a library is mostly in the books you haven't read... yet. Umberto
Eco famously had a lot to say on this topic.

Nasim Taleb coined the wholly unnecessary word "antilibrary" to describe this,
when really, it is the library containing only fully-digested books that is
the degenerate case.

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BerislavLopac
I do that on my Kindle account. It makes it even easier because the pile is
invisible.

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skybrian
My solution is to download sample books from Amazon. I don't buy them unless I
get to the end of the sample.

~~~
Insanity
Having a kindle makes this quite convenient and I've taken to doing this as
well. I find the sample size to be quite big enough to figure out if I'll end
up liking it or not :)

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greenmana
Libraries are pretty great. Costs very little and you have some time pressure
to get it done before having to return it. Most books don't get read more than
once anyway, so it's a pretty nice money saver too.

"What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses
like they’re trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?" – Jerry
Seinfeld

Although I totally get that different books are worth and important to
different people to be had around as your own.

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BrandoElFollito
I now know that I suffer from electronic components tsundoku.

I buy various elements on AliExpress (RF emitters or detectors, nodemcu, wifi
dongles,...) with the hope of using them ond day.

So far I used maybe 10% of what I accumulated and decided to stop buyi... oh
look, a new wifi switch I could reflash!

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stillbourne
Why would you buy a book you don't intend to read? Is it kind of like buying
home decorations? I mean I know how my habits work, I go to a bookstore,
browse books, start reading wait to see if the story catches or doesn't, buy
it or keep looking. Once I've got the hook on that story I can't shelve it
without finishing it. I don't understand how you could not. Maybe people buy
the books with a different intention?

~~~
gmiller123456
I think this is more common with non-fiction books.

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noir_lord
I have a stack of chess books that's ever growing.

My one in one out strategy fell apart because the British Chess Championship
is in town with the attendant giant book sale.

No more this week though.

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iends
I got a safari books online subscription and it cut down on the tech books
I’ve bought but never read. Highly recommend.

~~~
gmiller123456
I've been a Safari subscriber for a couple of years now, and subscribed to
Packt's before that. It both cut down on the books I bought and dramatically
increased how much I read. I would highly recommend anyone sign up for the
free trial, then for a month if you liked it. The cost for a month is less
than the cost of most of the books available.

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sAbakumoff
I added this thread to favorites but I prob will never read the referenced
article.

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wodenokoto
For those looking for the actual characters:

積読
[[http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/%C0%D1%C6%C9](http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/%C0%D1%C6%C9)]

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tretiy3
I am collecting domain names. Each new idea must came along with domain
bought. But each of them become expired in a year and my collection is not
very big.

