Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in a home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later.
% mdfind -onlyin ~ kind:pdf |wc -l
11116
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.pdf" | wc -l
18952
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.epub" | wc -l
2385
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.djvu" | wc -l
1384
prhodes@troubadour:~/Downloads/pdfs$ find . -name "*.mobi" | wc -l
125
I don't know windows well enough to know the equivalent. But I think there is an index on windows, and powershell may be able to poke at it.
Honestly, don't ever buy bestsellers. They're all bad and everything in them is wrong. Things become bestsellers because they find an audience beyond people who are smart or shrewd. If you wait 5 years and you still want to read them, people will pay you to haul them off. Software books are great, especially for people who need paper to learn well, but they're outdated before they're released. Only good for tearing out the pages for hamster cage liner or padding shipping/moving boxes.
> I think it's way better to shop at a bookstore filled exclusively with stuff you've already shown interest in
I think you should put things in your bookshelf or collection of pdfs to hold off FOMO. When you finally get back around to being interested in Bosnian history, the books you wanted might be impossible to get. If you never get back around to it, you can help some stranger out who did.
I guess this is becoming less true with the libgens and annas-archives of the world, but when those all disappear on the same day (that seemed like any other), you'll have missed out. I certainly don't miss the days when I spent years waiting for a book to come up on ebay or used.addall.com at a price under $150.
In the context of technical/political pieces, perhaps. But I have some reservations with even that limited scope
1. It's fine to target a more general audience if it gets them interested in a subject to begin with. Some inaccuracies help give context to learning before you break them. e.g. Saying "you can't subtract 3 from 2" in early learning, before later learning about the negative number space.
2. How many books of this nature even make best seller? Most stuff tends to be fiction or biographical so there's not much "wrong" there. Political stuff will be there as well, but is ultimately subjective.
Taleb calls it the anti-library