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gjm comments on Personal Library Management - Less Wrong Discussion
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Conjecture: a very large fraction of LWers have this problem.
I have somewhere in excess of 300 books on my to-be-read shelves. If there is a good solution to the problem, I'll be interested too. But I fear it's like dieting ("How do you lose weight?" "Eat less and exercise more." "Damn.") -- the only solutions are to buy fewer books or to find more time to spend reading them, and fiddling with reading lists and the like is second-order stuff. Which, I suppose, means that my advice on "how to approach this problem" is "Just do it" -- but it's advice I've been ineffective in applying to myself.
(Note: I am aware that it's possible that eating less and exercising more is not sufficient for some unfortunate individuals -- if, e.g., their bodies are misconfigured to prefer burning up muscle or something rather than excess fat. I claim no expert knowledge about whether that actually happens and, if so, how often. But, alas, it seems that eating less and exercising more is necessary.)
The key difference being that if you eat less, you actively have to change your behavior, whereas if you have an unrealistic amount of books to read of which you eliminate some, you're not. Instead, you're just updating your perception of the situation to involve less wishful thinking and to be more in tune with your actual resource constraints.
So if you throw out some of those books, you wouldn't be changing your daily reading behavior, you'd just acknowledge the reality of the situation, and nothing of value would be lost, merely an excess of books which you'd never have read anyways.
But dealing with a book-hoarding problem in anything other than the short term requires behaviour changes too: buying fewer books and/or losing timewasting habits that get in the way of reading more.
And throwing out books is as difficult psychologically for book-hoarding types as eating less is for most people.
I agree with your post, but there are definitely specific strategies that could be effective. For example, if reading my library were important enough to me, I would go to beeminder, set up a beeminder for number of pages read with some goal of pages per week, and I would be pretty much assured of reading a lot more books.