An antilibrary is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by Umberto Eco and popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku.
An antilibrary is a collection of books that are owned but have not yet been read. The term was coined by Umberto Eco and popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The concept it describes has been compared to the Japanese tsundoku.
== Etymology == alt=Image of Nassim Nicholas Taleb from the shoulders up. He has receding hair and a short mostly white beard.|thumb|189x189px|Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized the term antilibrary The term antilibrary was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable to describe the books that many people own but have not read. Taleb argued that such collections of books make people more humble and curious. He based the concept on the books kept by Umberto Eco —who invented the term "antilibrary" to describe Jonathan Swift's description of a library on Gulliver's Travels—writing that Eco "separates visitors into two categories": those who praise the size of his library and those who recognize that a library is a tool for research. Describing books that have been read as "far less valuable than unread ones", Taleb stated that "the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary." Taleb additionally referred to people interested in antilibraries as antischolars.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).