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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

Basically, this is just a classic inventory control problem. If the inventory is piling up, you need to either decrease the rate of acquisition, increase the rate of consumption, or (preferably) both.

I can't say how typical the situation is, but it's definitely not just you. I have quite the stack of books on my "to read" list, but I keep working my way through them (and adding more to the pile.) So it goes.

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I had this same inventory control problem with cookbooks. I solved it by making a rule for myself: No new cookbooks until I cook 30% of the recipes in all the ones I already have.

I have this same inventory control problem with computer science books. Good textbooks are expensive. If you implement a utilization rule like this, you can save yourself a lot of money on books you never end up reading. B&N, Borders and their ilk have liberal return policies, as does Amazon. This will help save lots of money. Also, the utilization rule prevents you from disadvantageous conditioning. The retail pleasure of acquisition can drive you to buy books faster than your actual reading rate.

I have quite the stack of books on my "to read" list, but I keep working my way through them (and adding more to the pile.) So it goes.

I have the same phenomenon with Irish Trad tunes I want to learn. The list is ever growing. (There are at least 30,000 of those.) My solution? I only learn the tunes I fall in love with. Life is short, so why waste time with something that's just "nice?" I think I'm going to apply this to books and other contexts.

Nice rules. I started to do something similar to your "only learn what you fall in love with". For some of the older books I bought once and I never read, now I know I will never read, because now I know better and I know they are garbage (or I know of better material now). So I won't waste my time reading those just to remove them from my todo list.

I guess I shouldn't have bought them either.

Buy older editions of textbooks and also the "Eastern Economy" (read: china/india printed on cheap paper) editions. You will save a pretty penny, and thermodynamics hasn't changed much since 1975.

(Obviously this won't work for machine learning.)

International Editions have saved me a ton of money. I found out about this when I started seeing big C++ books (the really thick ones) around the lab with a big sticker on it that read "not for sale in the USA" (or similar). These are the same book, though usually a bit more cheaply made, but at sometimes 10-20% of the price.

Where do you buy such kind of books? I can't find them in Ebay anymore. Probably it was not legal to export them.

That's what you think.

asks perpetual motion powered hovering maid to replicate another iced tea

As I was pondering here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=664383 : why do I keep working my way through them like some sort of automaton? "So it goes"? It doesn't have to go like that. You could buy one book and read it and then stop. How much am I really benefitting from reading and how much am I using it as an escapist excuse? Would I be a better person if I read 8 five-star books from Amazon than if I read 8 four-star books?

Is it really better to read a well reviewed book? Isn't a horrible book better for you in the same way that walking uphill is better for you than driving uphill?

Sometimes you just read about things you want to learn. At least that's the case of the books I talk about in this thread. For example, I'm driven by the curiosity to understand how some theories of physics work, particularly relativity and quantum theory. I've learned some extremely basic stuff about them, and I want to learn more, and more, and the more I learn, the harder it gets (it needs more mathematical tools, etc.).

Maybe a key is to read books that drive you towards a goal? I can understand your feeling, and I really appreciated your thread when it appeared in hn. But in my case the problem is different: I want to know a lot of things, and learning all of that will take me years, and a symptom of that is that I end up collecting tons of books that I keep reading slowly.

Isn't a horrible book better for you in the same way that walking uphill is better for you than driving uphill?

I feel like your analogy would be more akin to learning theorems by deriving them from first principles as opposed to taking them as gospel.

It's the material that should be hard, not gleaning information out of the book.

Inventory is a buffer against scarcity. As there is generally no scarcity with books, perhaps one should keep no inventory?

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