“People have this innate view - it comes from friendship and marriage - that commitment is good. takes his own advice, saying he finishes one book for every five to 10 he starts. We should ask ourselves if reading a book we’re getting little out of is the best use of scarce resources. On the topic of books, time-efficiency, and productivity, here is the Washington Times on books and Tyler Cowen: "One measures a circle beginning anywhere." - Charles Fort, "Lo!" (1931) And diving in head first will prevent you dancing on the side of the pool, never getting your feet wet. Arrange them by size, as the Quran was arranged. Have faith in that filtering, and simply start at one end and proceed to the other. You've already gone through some sort of filtering process to acquire them anyway, as part of your finals and six years of college. When you're young, you have to give them a good long fair shake. That's how many pages you should give a book before you decide it's not worth continuing. Subtract your age from the number one hundred. You'll meet yourself in the middle, with a core of books you read worth keeping and not a one you didn't that wasn't. The point is to recognize your own mortality and that there is not enough time to read all the books worth reading. It could be the book you just read, or a book you think you never will read, or a book chosen at random, or a book that will bring in good money. If by strange chance no one has ever looked at the same group of books as yourself, then any list you compile will be valid. Someone else has already done that work, and again it is something you can build on. Once your books are indexed, search online for lists of books containing the titles on your tentative reading lists. Even if they are wrong or incomplete, they are a foundation to build on. Books published before the mid-1960s can be entered using image recognition software (perhaps Google Goggles) or by application of finger to keyboard.Īs you index your books, patterns will emerge. Perhaps something based on the open source package zxing might be useful. Use a scanner to enter these titles into a computer. So I know what it's like to have a heck of a lot of books, and a need to organize them for use.īooks published since the mid-1960s will have an International Standard Book Number, a barcode or both. Now I'm indexing the second largest collection of works by and about R. At one time I had 35,000 books in my apartment. List of What Will Probably Never Be Read.Step 2 is going to be applying the Universal Decimal System,.Step 1 was making a list of all available books. This doesn't work so well with rarer books and older books, but they're a small enough minority that I can delcare a smashing success. as long as the ISBN is readily-recognized. While looking for alternatives, I found this web app, libib, which seems very promising.ĮDIT 2: I've spent most of the day cataloguing all of my stuff on libib, which is incredibly efficient. The main post will be gradually updated and amended as the discussion progresses.ĮDIT: For Mac Users, it appears that Delicious Library is a great solution. I've just finished my finals, and, after six years of college, I am faced with this fact: I have accumulated one heck of a lot of books, most of which I haven't read yet.Īn app, or at the very least an algorythm, on how to manage them, make a reading list, and go about reading them, is something I really wish for, but I have no idea how to approach this problem in a time-efficient, productive way, and I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel.ĭo any of you have the same problem? What are your solutions?
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