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Morendil comments on Home Economics - Less Wrong
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Where did you get that idea? Read "How to Justify a Private Library" by Umberto Eco, summarized here.
They're excellent for signalling purposes, too.
I've finished classifing them in UDC in an excel file, but once they and the shelves are properly labeled, it will signal "these books are for research" and "this guy is a nerd".
And while a large part of the titles is fiction, the largest part of the economic value, and, most importantly, in the expected time spent is either school-related books (for example, Introduction to Heat Transfer, by Frank M. White or Digital Signall Processing, by John G. Proakis), which are in the €60 price range or more, talk-about-one--topic-in-depth books (like Christian Salmon's Storytelling, or Gavin Weightman's Industrial Revolutionaries, or Daniel Canehman's Thinking, fast and slow), which tend to be in the €20 to €30 price range.
Really, buying a book might be somehow like buying a stock option; you buy the right to spend a resource (time and effort) on a book at your own leisure, rather than being constrained by the duty to give it back, or limits on how many you can take at once. And, when your time is valuable, the expected expense in time can have a dramatically larger value than the preliminary expense in coin... This would be an interesting topic to tackle...
I find that the internet is generally better indexed, though I suppose that if you can afford it, a large enough private library could give more easily accessible depth. I also suspect that, like me, most people here with many more books than they have read have libraries that are composed mostly of fiction, which is less useful for research purposes.
I don't buy fiction anymore, unless it's by Terry Pratchett or if it's Classics I Should Have Read Already, like stuff by Asimov or Dostoievsky, but those are usually extremely cheap if not free. No, I have my plate full with fanfiction, especially pony fics. I just can't keep up...