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.
- Step 1 was making a list of all available books.
- Step 2 is going to be applying the Universal Decimal System,
- Step 3 will be Establishing a
- Reading List and a
- List of What's Already Read and a
- List of What Will Probably Never Be Read
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.