5 ms·

Except books—but books are different. I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay. Mine isn't books (I usually give good books to frien

Except books—but books are different. I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay. Mine isn't books (I usually give good books to friends after reading them, and bad books to ebay). My own caveat would be raw materials for building or repairing things (electrical components, nuts and bolts, tools, etc).

wyclif 17y ago
It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books Until you find yourself having to move.
- clistctrl 17y ago
  so true, they take up a good amount of space and there's not a heck of a lot of air accumulating in that space, just paper and a lot of it. When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
- Luc 17y ago
  I have thousands of books and would love to get rid of them. I would need a future-proof platform that allows annotations, and that lets me migrate between devices (so I can keep my books for at least my lifetime). I guess I would also need a convenient book scanner, for those books that are no longer in print.
  - derwiki 17y ago
    I've often wondered why Amazon doesn't have a program like "send in your books, get a free Kindle copy of them"
    - JadeNB 17y ago
      I think that it's fairly clear why they don't do this --would they do it only for books purchased from amazon.com? If not, would they require some sort of proof of purchase? What about used books? What about books not currently available on the Kindle? If you send them an old edition of a book, then what edition do you get on the Kindle?-- but it's such a gorgeous idea. This has been one of the biggest roadblocks in my attempts to decide whether to buy a Kindle: I have a huge library, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars in format-shifting doesn't appeal to me. If I could even just get a discount for books that I already own, it would make me much, much more likely to take the plunge.
  - gwern 17y ago
    JPGs in PDF form? Both of those formats will be around forever. I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.) Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
    - nvoorhies 17y ago
      Scribbling in the margins of PDFs isn't very easy, and losing the ability to annotate effortlessly is a big loss for many readers.
      - riffraff 17y ago
        I believe it's actually pretty easy in e.g. Preview.app on the mac.
- wheels 17y ago
  It's really not that bad. The things that are time consuming about moving are packing, disassembling, organizing, reassembling and so on. I own over 1000 books and live on the 5th floor of a building without an elevator, and even so, with 4 people it took us about 5-10 minutes to move the books in. Packing them into boxes took maybe 20 minutes. Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
  - Groxx 17y ago
    Books pack really easily, and they're solid enough to stack almost anything on the resulting box. It's the random junk that's hard.
- gcb 17y ago
  i'm moving to another country in the next weeks. plan was to leave everything behind but the (academic) wife's some thousand books. I was going to spend some little money on the shipping. Then i found out that the company would pay a ship container and give me hardly any financial support to settle there. So now i'm on full pack rat mode! ...and i can't tell you how nice and easy it was to ship only the some thousand books. Everything else by comparisson is hell. You have to fill some isurance forms on everything. Packaging is a pain. You can't separate a bed into smaller boxes like a shelf of books. Etc
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
praptak 17y ago
"I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay." I believe anything is OK (even in large numbers) as long as it is easy for one's mind to treat it as one "item". Books (and probably your raw materials) are uniform. You put the next one with all the others and forget it, so it creates little additional drag on you. Yeah, up to a point when you need to expand storage, but the general rule remains.
schackbrian 17y ago
I used to collect books, and then I donated them to the library. Now, I have more space, they keep track of them for me, and I can check them out whenever I want.
- andyjdavis 17y ago
  I tried to donate a stack of books to my local library. They weren't "new or as new" so they wouldn't accept them :( They weren't damaged. They just didn't look new. Them not taking them wasn't so bad. I was more annoyed by the attitude of the staff who made a big song and dance as if they were doing me a favour by even considering taking free books. A library accepting free books in good condition seemed like a no brainer to me :|

wyclif 17y ago

It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books Until you find yourself having to move.

clistctrl 17y ago
so true, they take up a good amount of space and there's not a heck of a lot of air accumulating in that space, just paper and a lot of it. When I moved from home to college, I really only had 2 or 3 medium boxes of things i wanted/could take with me. Then from college to my first apartment I also had really accumulated nothing of value, and threw away a lot. When I moved from my first apartment to my second, an unbelievable thing happened. My first job brought with it a mountain of stuff. I really didn't realize it as I always kept that place spotlessly tidy (When I start to think through a piece of code I tend to walk around cleaning, its like a mindless activity that helps my mind work) The big mistake I made was using server boxes i swiped from work to move. Next time (which should be in a few months) I plan on using more smaller boxes.
Luc 17y ago
I have thousands of books and would love to get rid of them. I would need a future-proof platform that allows annotations, and that lets me migrate between devices (so I can keep my books for at least my lifetime). I guess I would also need a convenient book scanner, for those books that are no longer in print.
- derwiki 17y ago
  I've often wondered why Amazon doesn't have a program like "send in your books, get a free Kindle copy of them"
  - JadeNB 17y ago
    I think that it's fairly clear why they don't do this --would they do it only for books purchased from amazon.com? If not, would they require some sort of proof of purchase? What about used books? What about books not currently available on the Kindle? If you send them an old edition of a book, then what edition do you get on the Kindle?-- but it's such a gorgeous idea. This has been one of the biggest roadblocks in my attempts to decide whether to buy a Kindle: I have a huge library, and the idea of spending thousands of dollars in format-shifting doesn't appeal to me. If I could even just get a discount for books that I already own, it would make me much, much more likely to take the plunge.
- gwern 17y ago
  JPGs in PDF form? Both of those formats will be around forever. I recently scanned a bunch of books using gscan2pdf; it makes it relatively easy, and integrates some decent utilities like Tesseract for OCR. (Some fiddling with controls meant that I could start playing a movie and mechanically flip pages and punch the scan button.) Relatively high-resolution scans like 3-500 DPI mean you can get big PDFs (~200MB for a big anthology was normal), but this isn't much of a concern to me: I can clean them up later if I really need space, and in an era where 1.5tb is 100$, 200MB is nothing (1 or 2 cents of space?).
  - nvoorhies 17y ago
    Scribbling in the margins of PDFs isn't very easy, and losing the ability to annotate effortlessly is a big loss for many readers.
    - riffraff 17y ago
      I believe it's actually pretty easy in e.g. Preview.app on the mac.
wheels 17y ago
It's really not that bad. The things that are time consuming about moving are packing, disassembling, organizing, reassembling and so on. I own over 1000 books and live on the 5th floor of a building without an elevator, and even so, with 4 people it took us about 5-10 minutes to move the books in. Packing them into boxes took maybe 20 minutes. Even though by weight it's much lighter the book shelves are a real pain in the ass.
- Groxx 17y ago
  Books pack really easily, and they're solid enough to stack almost anything on the resulting box. It's the random junk that's hard.
gcb 17y ago
i'm moving to another country in the next weeks. plan was to leave everything behind but the (academic) wife's some thousand books. I was going to spend some little money on the shipping. Then i found out that the company would pay a ship container and give me hardly any financial support to settle there. So now i'm on full pack rat mode! ...and i can't tell you how nice and easy it was to ship only the some thousand books. Everything else by comparisson is hell. You have to fill some isurance forms on everything. Packaging is a pain. You can't separate a bed into smaller boxes like a shelf of books. Etc

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

praptak 17y ago

"I suspect most people have their own personal caveat to this essay." I believe anything is OK (even in large numbers) as long as it is easy for one's mind to treat it as one "item". Books (and probably your raw materials) are uniform. You put the next one with all the others and forget it, so it creates little additional drag on you. Yeah, up to a point when you need to expand storage, but the general rule remains.

schackbrian 17y ago

I used to collect books, and then I donated them to the library. Now, I have more space, they keep track of them for me, and I can check them out whenever I want.

andyjdavis 17y ago
I tried to donate a stack of books to my local library. They weren't "new or as new" so they wouldn't accept them :( They weren't damaged. They just didn't look new. Them not taking them wasn't so bad. I was more annoyed by the attitude of the staff who made a big song and dance as if they were doing me a favour by even considering taking free books. A library accepting free books in good condition seemed like a no brainer to me :|