I have a problem

One of my most benign habits is that I buy a lot of Amazon Kindle books — current count 162 (!!!!) and the majority of them are unread. While this is clearly an unreasonable number of books, in my defense, I bought almost of all of them through Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deals, which sells books for about three dollars.

I typically buy the books through a link on Twitter or their daily emails. One day, I noticed that the links were always something like amazon.com, a series of numbers, the word obidos, and the book title. My curiosity was piqued so I googled obidos, learned it was a town in Brazil through which the fastest part of the Amazon flows, and was pretty impressed with the cleverness of Amazon programmers. With some more searching, I learned that Obidos was the name of Amazon’s original page rendering engine (I have no idea what that means; I read it here), and is also the name of one of their buildings in Seattle.

I just finished reading and enjoyed one of these books, Krakatoa by Simon Winchester (who wrote a favorite book of mine, The Professor and The Madman, which tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary).

As I was typing this, I wanted to see if it was defensible that I only bought these Kindle books because they were on sale. So I opened my Apple Books app, which, as far as I know doesn’t have daily book sales, and found an additional 130 books. Perhaps my habit is not so benign. I might have a problem.

Tsundoku (Japanese)

Acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. From Wikipedia, and confirmed by my son who studies Japanese, the word combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books).

h/t to Adam for the word.