Bibliomania: the strange history of compulsive book buying

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 But in this concrete cases the feeling of awe is superseded by the requirements of the moment.

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."

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

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.

It's a very good way to quickly go full digital and declutter the house. Some of the technical or scientific thick volumes were a pretty good deal.

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 ;)