Umberto Eco's Library

It was Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan, who told me about Umberto Eco's huge library—50,000 volumes according to a Wikipedia article. It got me thinking. What should I do with my growing collection? What is my purpose? What do I plan to get out of all these books?

Right now, I actually have about 600 volumes in real-world books and I buy additional books at a rate of about 40 titles per year. On the other hand, I probably have 2,000 volumes in digital books downloaded since last April. (There should have been more, but I hated those in CHM format so I deleted most of them.)

Originally, I wanted to maintain digital copies of books for accessibility. I'm planning to establish a research company and I needed a lot of ideas. So far, I already managed to download a lot of what I may need. But lately, I'm becoming more aware of the time I put into downloading and the apparent foolishness of it. Then, listening to Taleb (the audio book version of The Black Swan) speak of Umberto Eco's library makes this seemingly trivial pursuit a necessary ingredient in the quest for wisdom—and maybe, for our sanity.