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This sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me. I get so frantic trying to download all I can! Very, very surprising to me, one o
by abnry 6y ago
This sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me. I get so frantic trying to download all I can!
Very, very surprising to me, one of the free books turns out to be directly related to my new job (like, my boss's PhD advisor wrote the book).
- hnarayanan 6y agoAnd one was written by a mentor of mine who passed away shortly after completing the book. :(
- BossingAround 6y ago> This sort of thing literally brings out the starving aggressive animal in me. I get so frantic trying to download all I can! This feeling is not useful, unless you follow through with your initial impulse and go through all the books. I feel like this feeling is partially what fuels our unsustainable consumerism and growth; we all have it, sadly.
- californical 6y agoI don't think it's necessarily bad -- I collect free ebooks when I can, even if I'm not interested in reading them now but think I might someday. Then, later if I'm thinking about learning Rust (for example), I can go to the free book collection of mine and see if I have anything, then read through them. I've done this a few times. Even if I only get value out of 20% of that collection, I wouldn't have known in advance what 20% I'd eventually be interested in. And I do still pay for physical books too (but I don't stockpile those, and buy them when I actually want to read them)
- BossingAround 6y agoI can see your point. From my perspective, the "let's collect it because what if I need it later" mindset is not wrong at all times, but I think we're selectively blind to those 95% in which case it's a miss (i.e. in our case, you'd download an ebook and forget you even have it in like a week). In ebooks, this doesn't really create a bad outcome, but I think this mindset can manifest in other aspects of our lives as well and that's where it's very much less desirable. It was just an offtopic remark uttered with no judgement, but it's something I've been sensitive in my own attitude.
- psexec 6y agoI collect every book that I come across, and I can't count the number of times it's been helpful (one month, or five years later). It doesn't matter if you can't remember the book after a week, fzf is here to help you. If you got interested in a new topic (like the aforementioned Rust), press Ctrl+T and type "rust". Or you can suppress the impulse and skip getting the book, then either forget the site altogether, or visit it five years later and find that it got shut down four years ago.
- f0ok 6y agoUmberto Eco had quite a library of unread books. https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...
- alberto_ol 6y agoeco walking in his personal library https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF9tG5Q6NTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF9tG5Q6NTA
- g-b-r 6y agoAnd I thought that my ~1000 e-books were a record...
- dhosek 6y ago1000 books is really not much. After culling, I have 1000 books on my read shelves and easily 200 or so unread books. And that's just what I have in print and doesn't count the music books or the rare book shelf or my wife's two bookcases of print books.
- g-b-r 6y agoYou're right indeed, maybe in the e-books side it's rarer... Anyway, my wallet felt it, considering I've done most of it in about 4 years with a relatively modest salary
- dhosek 6y agoAfter I got my first job, I went on a bookstore crawl through Santa Monica back when the Third Street Promenade was full of independent shops and bookstores. I came home with a car full of books and a thousand-dollar credit card bill. It's easy to forget that your income is finite when you're young and foolish.
- g-b-r 6y ago
- kubav 6y agoProblem is that you rarely find good books this way so you have pile of books which are not worth reading. Determining which books are good takes a lot of time. This is reason I have stopped hoarding books from cheap or free sources. It is way better to download/buy/pirate books recommended on the internet than trying to find them myself.
- snakeboy 6y agoA reasonable strategy for me is: 1. Trawl through a resource like this when I come across them 2. If one looks interesting, do a quick google search of "[sub-category] recommended texts for [my-level] level" 3. Buy or Pirate the top recommended text Resources like this serve as good inspiration to learn about something new.
- abnry 6y agoI actually agree it isn't that useful. At least for me. My attitude is that high quality sources are worth more than low quality ones.
- entha_saava 6y agoCan I introduce you to library genesis? Or, if you don't like piracy, upenn's online books Page?
- noir_lord 6y agoThat would definitely be a form of Nerd Sniping[1] [1] https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoUPenn in particular wow great site thank you.
- specialist 6y agoYa. I'm embarrassed by my hoarding behavior. Took me a decade to let go of my CDs, even though I had stopped listening to them much earlier. I've only managed to cull ~1/2 of my physical books. My mitigation strategy for ebooks is quickly adding to my bookmark's "Books" folder and close the tab.
- ghaff 6y agoI used to be much more of a packrat than I am now. I've slowly been winnowing out stuff liked used computer equipment and enough books so that they all fit in my existing bookshelves (more or less). And I've slowly been digitizing more and more things. I'm probably still at least something of a digital packrat but a lot of that is it's just easier to hold onto stuff than expend the mental energy to figure out what to keep and what to delete.