[apolretom]

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."

[jsperson]

Great quote. Black Swan happens to be one of my unread books. You've propted me to pick it back up.

More generally, I feel there's no reason to buy books before I need to read them. Effectively Amazon has become my library. Need a book - $10 and you can pull it off the shelf and into your Kindle.

This saves my back when moving too. I have about 650 books in my Kindle library. 90% read in entirety. Moving those would suck!

Edit - fixed an autocorrect misfire