Quote:
Originally Posted by sealbeater
Endless choice. I subscribe to the anti-library philosophy.
“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 don’t 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 menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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I think he should be talking about reference and similar books, not unread novels.
IMHO, having a big library of novels and fiction stuff in your reader, if it not for consultancy, is a waste of battery and time. Battery because the files needs to be scanned by the library program, indexed, and so, and time because your reader will be waaaay faster with a lot of less books, not talking the time you will need to find the book you want (even with the search capacity).
Other thing is to have a "reservoir" of books. Currently I have about 60.000 ebooks in Spanish, mostly novels, but they aren't in my ereaders, but in my NAS, indexed by name.
I have, for reference, some complete collections, mostly in PDF facsimile: Complete Scientific American, complete Investigación y Ciencia (SA translation in Spanish), and most of the Pulp era magazines, and other miscellanea. I have them in iCloud Drive, indexed by DEVONthink to make instant search of any thing I need.
But in my readers, I only have what I'm reading and two or three future books.