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Comment by bluehex | Hacker News Reader

They kind of miss some of the charm of this word in translation. Yes “tsumu” is pile up and “doku” is reading but “(v)de-oku” is to do that verb in preparation or “for later”. So tsunde-oku which you can contract to tsundoku also literally just means to pile up something for later. It’s a wonderful pun.

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I must admit this is something I certainly can relate to. I buy probably more than average programming books and can only read some of them when I buy them. But a situation will come up, where it’s really handy to just reach into the book shelf / library and have one or two good books at hand to read and solve the current issue I run into or give them to a cooperator to level up the skills.

And I must admit I did something similar for electronics projects.

Paraphrasing Umberto Eco, there are two kinds of libraries: one kind are collections of trophies and mementos, but the other kind can be formidable resource in right hands. The latter one is knowledge management tool, and contains also unread books because it is useful to also manage ones future knowledge.

If you want to go the deep end, in 1970s or so Eco wrote guidebook to academic thesis writing that comes with a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes, of course most conveniently (though maybe not most cheaply) used with your personal research library that contains whole of your bibliography.

That said, there is also a failure modes of sorts. One that used to be famous was people who collected a respectable looking library (or had someone collect it) but never read or used it themselves, only show off their supposedly good taste in books to visitors. Other, related one, but more in the spirit of plans "I will do all the cool things I wanted ro do when I have time after retirement" involves similar mismanaging ones time and thus spending too much time collecting the library compared to using it.

> a tutorial how to bootstrap a bibliography and an index card system for your research or other professional purposes

Is this related to/inspired from Zettelkasten?

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