antilibrary

I have too many books, especially in digital form. Whenever a book piques my interest, I immediately seek it out, acquire it by any means possible, and at least read its table of contents. This of course results in piles of books that I will never manage to read. As my knowledge expands, the pile keeps getting bigger.

This is not an unknown phenomenon for knowledge seekers. Umberto Eco had a huge library, more than 30,000 books. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, describes Eco’s library as the antilibrary:

[Umberto Eco] separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know …. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

In this sense, your library defines the borders of your knowledge. As your knowledge expands, your library grows in size. However, not every inch inside the borders is under your dominion. To exercise control over them, one needs to see them like a state. Just like the sovereign state holds censuses and fractures the land into taxable portions, the antilibrary needs to be indexed and cataloged. Not every pile of books is an antilibrary; most are just decor signaling knowledge.

I have been thinking about how to make use of my antilibrary for a long time. If I put on my engineering hat, I come up with these requirements:

• Having an up-to-date index of all books with accurate metadata
• Ability to perform full text search on all books or a subset
• Ability to reference search results by exact location in the book

Index and metadata management can be handled by Calibre, while full text search is handled by Recoll. I’ve started experimenting with these tools, but I find the user interface of Calibre very clunky and the search results in Recoll hard to parse. The engineer in me wants to build. But I don’t want to be the guy who starts learning LaTeX to write his doctoral thesis and ends up with no thesis and still no LaTeX.

#lazyweb, do you have any suggestions?