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Comment by benatkin | Hacker News Reader

I try to do the opposite. I ignore the books I have when selecting the next book to read, and try to determine what's most important. Then, if I already have it, I'll read it, and if not, I'll get it.

It takes a relatively long time to read a book, so it's worth it to me to get the one I want to read most, and pay for it if I have to.

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Totally. The cost of the book is often so much less than the cost of the time spent reading it (am assuming a developed country's perspective here). So one should optimize for the time rather than the cost of ownership of the book.

I have a huge library of books (and I have read many of them), and still find pressing topics I need to know which are not covered by any of the books I have (and neither seemingly by the Internet at least till I discover some relevant keywords).

An additional thing is that I have read through the introductions of a lot more books, and that by itself gives a first understanding of the subject.

There is the old quote about

"We can buy books but we can't buy the time to read them."

I think the main issue is that people ge excited about a topic and buy the book. They enjoy few chapters but soon they come across something more interesting on internet and then buy that book too. Almost all non-fiction has some boring bits which you just have to struggle through to reach interesting parts. Its in this struggle stage I find myself most vulnerable to start reading another book and leaving the current one. Do this for years and you end up having lots of unread books. I thought this is what OP was referring to.

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