Do any of you have the same problem?
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.
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.
An 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.
Do any of you have the same problem? What are your solutions?
The main post will be gradually updated and amended as the discussion progresses.
EDIT: For Mac Users, it appears that Delicious Library is a great solution. While looking for alternatives, I found this web app, libib, which seems very promising.
EDIT 2: I've spent most of the day cataloguing all of my stuff on libib, which is incredibly efficient... as long as the ISBN is readily-recognized. 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.