
Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying - diodorus
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/26/bibliomania-the-strange-history-of-compulsive-book-buying
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apolretom
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."

~~~
jsperson
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!

Edit - fixed an autocorrect misfire

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weavie
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..

~~~
aswanson
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.

~~~
ladytron
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.

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balladeer
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.

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moultano
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.

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staked
Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness ([https://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Madness-
Bibliophiles-Biblioman...](https://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Madness-Bibliophiles-
Bibliomanes-Eternal/dp/0979949157)) is a wonderful book on bibliophiles if
anyone is inclined to read more on the subject.

~~~
MaysonL
Just checked out my local library for this: they have 10 books by Basbanes.
Going to pick up two of them next time I'm there.

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alesa
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 ;)

~~~
endentru
> 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.

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kartan
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.

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socratees
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.

Interesting!

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madengr
I'm sort of on a quest to collect all of Asimov's books in hard-back. Will
probably never do it, but it's nice reading them along the way.

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pmoriarty
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.

~~~
epimetheus
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.

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ensiferum
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.

~~~
novalis78
if you do, let me know your seller name ;-)

~~~
ladytron
Let all of us know! We will have an auction!

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tehwalrus
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...)

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TuringNYC
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!

~~~
omnibrain
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.

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amelius
I'm wondering: isn't this whole phenomenon more about information-mania than
biblio-mania?

Do people who collect lots of books also read lots of online-material, and
vice versa?

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rsaarelm
The to-read shelf on a Goodreads account is a nice cost and space efficient
place to hoard books.

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zczc
my solution to bibliomania problem is to hoard pirated e-books and to buy
e-books or paper books only after reading some way through

