Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
theguardian.com
Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#2I 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.
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#3I 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.
if you do, let me know your seller name ;-)
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#4I'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.
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#5Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness (https://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Madness-Bibliophiles-Biblioman...) is a wonderful book on bibliophiles if anyone is inclined to read more on the subject.
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#6I 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..
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#7I 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 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.
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#8Major 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!
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#9At 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!
Re: Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying
#10Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness ( https://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Madness-Bibliophiles-Biblioman... ) is a wonderful book on bibliophiles if anyone is inclined to read more on the subject.
Are you trying to be ironic?