4 ms·

When I buy books, I intend to read them; I expect Eco does too. I think the point is the library of as-yet-unread books is more interesting than the library of

When I buy books, I intend to read them; I expect Eco does too. I think the point is the library of as-yet-unread books is more interesting than the library of already-read books. And it differs from Wikipedia or the Amazon catalog; it's a collection of books that interested me enough to lay out money and shelf space to have nearby.

09bjb 10y ago
Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need. I also appreciated all the oblique suggestions that our appreciation of what we don't know, and how we should temper our certitude, should INCREASE with greater knowledge. Way too many PhD types out there stomping on people with their expansive knowledge when they should know better than most the degree to which they're in the dark.
- paganel 10y ago
  > Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need. I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read "immediately", in fact I have books which I've bought 3-4 years ago, of which I think about every 2-3 months, but which I've not yet had the time to read. I definitely do not have 10X the money that I need, even though I agree that books are one of my few guilty pleasures (I oftentimes think that I was born in order to read books). I also like to sit on my couch and look at my bookshelves, it gives me a really pleasant feeling. I do that every 2-3 days. I like books.
  - lukas099 10y ago
    (1) "I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read 'immediately'" (2) "I definitely do not have 10X the money that I need" Perhaps if you didn't do (1) (and similar behavior), you would have 10x the money you need.
    - paganel 10y ago
      I was half-kidding, but around my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) books are really not that expensive. I'd say the average price I pay for one is 10-15 euros, with the maximum at around 25 euros, and lots of 5 euro books that I buy from antique bookstores. Yeah, were I to put together all the money I paid for books I haven't read yet I would probably gather enough to pay for a decent 7-day vacation in Greece (and I'm not talking about going to expensive places like Santorini). I wouldn't be able to buy an apartment out of it, which is what I would do with a sudden influx of "10x money".
      - gjm11 10y ago
        In some places it may cost more to shelve and house the books than to buy them. (Unless you're happy storing most of your books in boxes.) Probably not if you're in Eastern Europe, but if you're somewhere like San Francisco or London then the cost of the extra space taken up by having a lot of books may well be more than the cost of the books themselves. (I live a little way outside Cambridge, in England. I reckon the price of an extra reasonably-sized room is maybe £60k, and if that room is dedicated entirely to books it can take maybe 4000 or so. So I'm paying about £15/book for housing. If I were in Cambridge itself the figure might be 2x that or more; in London, substantially more again; in New York, even more.)
        paganel 10y ago
        I think having books in your house is totally worth the price, even in the cases you mention, especially if you have kids. IMHO having your kids being surrounded by books since an early age it's one of the best ways to convince them that reading and wanting to learn about new stuff is good. I personally put that above them attending a good school, and I've read about lots of parents on HN choosing to purchase more expensive houses only because they were closer to good schools.
        gjm11 10y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt, I agree, and the reason I did that calculation in the first place is that such a lot of the wall-space in my house is occupied by books. (But there are no rooms completely given over to books; instead the fiction is in the main bedroom, the academic-y books in the study, the humour in the guest bedroom, etc.) Our daughter reads a whole lot, but as well as growing up surrounded by books she has very bookish genes, and bookish friends, and a library two doors down the road, and so forth, so it's hard to disentangle the causes.
- gjm11 10y ago
  > if you have 10x more money than you need No: if you have 10x more money than you need to spend on books. That's not such a high bar to clear. (And most people who buy a lot of books they don't read immediately do so less spectacularly than Eco. I consider myself to have a pretty bad case of Unread Book Syndrome, and for me the excess is more like 10-15%.)
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  I had more books than I could reasonably read when I was still an undergrad on student welfare payments. Books aren't that expensive...

09bjb 10y ago

Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need. I also appreciated all the oblique suggestions that our appreciation of what we don't know, and how we should temper our certitude, should INCREASE with greater knowledge. Way too many PhD types out there stomping on people with their expansive knowledge when they should know better than most the degree to which they're in the dark.

paganel 10y ago
> Yeah...I'm all for this approach, except for the part that assumes you're going to buy a book that you're not going to read immediately. Totally viable and possibly useful...if you have 10x more money than you need. I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read "immediately", in fact I have books which I've bought 3-4 years ago, of which I think about every 2-3 months, but which I've not yet had the time to read. I definitely do not have 10X the money that I need, even though I agree that books are one of my few guilty pleasures (I oftentimes think that I was born in order to read books). I also like to sit on my couch and look at my bookshelves, it gives me a really pleasant feeling. I do that every 2-3 days. I like books.
- lukas099 10y ago
  (1) "I definitely buy books that I don't intend to read 'immediately'" (2) "I definitely do not have 10X the money that I need" Perhaps if you didn't do (1) (and similar behavior), you would have 10x the money you need.
  - paganel 10y ago
    I was half-kidding, but around my parts of the world (Eastern Europe) books are really not that expensive. I'd say the average price I pay for one is 10-15 euros, with the maximum at around 25 euros, and lots of 5 euro books that I buy from antique bookstores. Yeah, were I to put together all the money I paid for books I haven't read yet I would probably gather enough to pay for a decent 7-day vacation in Greece (and I'm not talking about going to expensive places like Santorini). I wouldn't be able to buy an apartment out of it, which is what I would do with a sudden influx of "10x money".
    - gjm11 10y ago
      In some places it may cost more to shelve and house the books than to buy them. (Unless you're happy storing most of your books in boxes.) Probably not if you're in Eastern Europe, but if you're somewhere like San Francisco or London then the cost of the extra space taken up by having a lot of books may well be more than the cost of the books themselves. (I live a little way outside Cambridge, in England. I reckon the price of an extra reasonably-sized room is maybe £60k, and if that room is dedicated entirely to books it can take maybe 4000 or so. So I'm paying about £15/book for housing. If I were in Cambridge itself the figure might be 2x that or more; in London, substantially more again; in New York, even more.)
      - paganel 10y ago
        I think having books in your house is totally worth the price, even in the cases you mention, especially if you have kids. IMHO having your kids being surrounded by books since an early age it's one of the best ways to convince them that reading and wanting to learn about new stuff is good. I personally put that above them attending a good school, and I've read about lots of parents on HN choosing to purchase more expensive houses only because they were closer to good schools.
        gjm11 10y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt, I agree, and the reason I did that calculation in the first place is that such a lot of the wall-space in my house is occupied by books. (But there are no rooms completely given over to books; instead the fiction is in the main bedroom, the academic-y books in the study, the humour in the guest bedroom, etc.) Our daughter reads a whole lot, but as well as growing up surrounded by books she has very bookish genes, and bookish friends, and a library two doors down the road, and so forth, so it's hard to disentangle the causes.
gjm11 10y ago
> if you have 10x more money than you need No: if you have 10x more money than you need to spend on books. That's not such a high bar to clear. (And most people who buy a lot of books they don't read immediately do so less spectacularly than Eco. I consider myself to have a pretty bad case of Unread Book Syndrome, and for me the excess is more like 10-15%.)
ajdlinux 10y ago
I had more books than I could reasonably read when I was still an undergrad on student welfare payments. Books aren't that expensive...