September 14, 2007
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boxes
I’ve just started going through some of my things and boxing them up because I’ll have to eventually and I was bored. While boxing my books I decided to do something a little different and sort them by subject this time. What I found was a little bit of a surprising breakdown:
1 box mathematics
1 box economics, finance, investment, self help
1 box political science, law, copyright, history, current events, etc.
1 box miscellaneous nonfiction
1.5 boxes philosophy and religion
3 boxes programming, computer science, information technology, software project management, etc.The boxes are 10 by 12 by 15 inches by the way. I didn’t do my fiction books yet. Those are currently occupying a 4/5ths of a 5 shelf bookshelf. All of this doesn’t count books I am reading right now or books that I flat out threw away because I just don’t want to own them or books that are currently in my possession that I don’t own.
It bothers me how many more CS/IT books I have than everything else. Philosophy I love so I’ll keep those forever. Math, econ, poly sci all feel as if they could potentially have some use in the future or at least I feel as if they have enlightened me in some way so I am in no rush to get rid of them. Math in particular is pretty timeless as reference works go. But what of the CS? Do I really need or want to keep them?
Those boxes are also by far the heaviest of the boxes. For some reason CS book are all excessively big heavy tomes, a lot of them hard back. In these boxes are also the most books I haven’t even read yet. And they’re also the books I am least likely to read or reread in the future especially if the fates would have it as I prefer that I never have to program again (which is looking increasingly unlikely as time goes on unfortunately). Still, although there are a lot of classic CS books and useful reference materials here, most of it is hopelessly out of date these days and you can often find the same information, only more up to date, online for free (though not always as well written or organized).
So what am I to do with all of these useless programming books? Any ideas? Maybe I will sell them all as one big lot on ebay with a starting bid of $0.01 and see what people are willing to pay for them.
I’m sure the day after I give them up I will miss them and wish I’d kept them all. But then that’s the kind of thinking that got me into having to deal with so many damn books in the first place.
