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Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unrea
by piskov 1y ago
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.
- blackhaj7 1y agoNice! Taleb calls it the anti-library
- yulker 1y agoSpiritually different intention, but both yield lots of unread material at hand. The parent's is "bought with best intentions" but letting it pile up despite that intention, Taleb's is purposefully accumulating material that you don't intend to read unless a future you finds it helpful to explore that book
- treetalker 1y agoResearch tool!
- f1shy 1y agoThis is what I do. When I see a free PDF that seems well written, or was suggested to me, I save it in the bucket “maybe someday I might need that” but l know I will 99% never read. My experience is that it is useful. At least 10 books that were deep in that bucket were useful for me, and ended reading them. I must have 10000 though.
- dotancohen 1y agoThe time is not far where you'll be able to train an LLM on them, which will then present to you the information as you need it.
- dunham 1y agodo pdfs count? % mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l 11116 (2k of those are in my directory of github checkouts and there are duplicates in there.)
- mindcrime 1y agoThey totally do! And epub, mobi, djvu... prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l 18952 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l 2385 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l 1384 prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l 125 (There are definitely duplicates in those, FWIW)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoWhy are you downloading mobi files? Seriously, I only do that if there is no epub, and only keep it long enough to convert it.
- mindcrime 1y agoPretty much that. If the only copy I can find is .mobi.. or, occasionally perhaps, just by mistake.
- dotancohen 1y agoIs mdfind a Windows executable? Is there a standalone version that I might be able to use on the rare occasions I need to fight with somebody's Windows box?
- Jtsummers 1y agomdfind is a built-in with macOS. It's similar to find (should be on your *nix system if you have one) which can be installed with Cygwin on Windows. On Windows, you'd use Powershell and Get-ChildItem (I don't think it's case sensitive, but I don't use PS much).
- pessimizer 1y agoI think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in, like your bookshelf or ebook directory. The only caveat when it comes to paper is not to buy shit e.g. bestsellers, or software books that you're not going to read and use right away. If you don't buy shit (this is also true with board games and guitars), you can resell likely for about what you paid (or sometimes unexpectedly far more), whenever you want. Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
- dotancohen 1y ago> I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in That sounds like quite the endorsement for targeted advertising. In a good way - really I would love targeted advertising if it were implemented differently.
- pessimizer 1y agoPretty well-established that targeted advertising works better than untargeted advertising, all other things being equal. I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did. I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoTargeted ads are great, when it's actually consumer focused. Sadly the nature of modern ads makes it so all the power is taken from the consumer. A proper targeted ad should have the ability to say to it "I never want to see yo again", and virtually no advert would ever want that to happen.