Problem is that you rarely find good books this way so you have pile of books which are not worth reading. Determining which books are good takes a lot of time. This is reason I have stopped hoarding books from cheap or free sources. It is way better to download/buy/pirate books recommended on the internet than trying to find them myself.

A reasonable strategy for me is: 1. Trawl through a resource like this when I come across them 2. If one looks interesting, do a quick google search of "[sub-category] recommended texts for [my-level] level" 3. Buy or Pirate the top recommended text

Resources like this serve as good inspiration to learn about something new.

I can see your point. From my perspective, the "let's collect it because what if I need it later" mindset is not wrong at all times, but I think we're selectively blind to those 95% in which case it's a miss (i.e. in our case, you'd download an ebook and forget you even have it in like a week).

In ebooks, this doesn't really create a bad outcome, but I think this mindset can manifest in other aspects of our lives as well and that's where it's very much less desirable.

It was just an offtopic remark uttered with no judgement, but it's something I've been sensitive in my own attitude.

I collect every book that I come across, and I can't count the number of times it's been helpful (one month, or five years later). It doesn't matter if you can't remember the book after a week, fzf is here to help you. If you got interested in a new topic (like the aforementioned Rust), press Ctrl+T and type "rust".

Or you can suppress the impulse and skip getting the book, then either forget the site altogether, or visit it five years later and find that it got shut down four years ago.

For every one site that shut down, there are a dozen replacements.

Not legal.

There have been plenty of instances where you could get lifelong legal ownership of something very valuable only if you got it at a certain time, and that time often ends abruptly without warnings.

Umberto Eco had quite a library of unread books.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilib...

eco walking in his personal library https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF9tG5Q6NTA

And I thought that my ~1000 e-books were a record...

1000 books is really not much. After culling, I have 1000 books on my read shelves and easily 200 or so unread books. And that's just what I have in print and doesn't count the music books or the rare book shelf or my wife's two bookcases of print books.

You're right indeed, maybe in the e-books side it's rarer...

Anyway, my wallet felt it, considering I've done most of it in about 4 years with a relatively modest salary

After I got my first job, I went on a bookstore crawl through Santa Monica back when the Third Street Promenade was full of independent shops and bookstores. I came home with a car full of books and a thousand-dollar credit card bill. It's easy to forget that your income is finite when you're young and foolish.

My personal story instead is that I had always been convinced that books were useless in software or web development, that everything you needed (and had to do) was read the specifications, standards and official manuals (I dropped out of college very early).

After a few years, when trying to figure out a new thing, I conceded to turn to some book and a world opened.

Along with the discovery of O'Reilly's, and then other publishers', late shop of drm-free PDFs (which also solved the serious space problems I would have had with paper books), I went on a e-books binge, from software craft to every conceivable CS field.

I am scared to estimate how much I spent, but I'm reasonably glad of what I learned and what I have at hand.