Life In 19x19

Some interesting viewpoints on unread books: http://www.markbernstein.org/Mar0801/UnreadBooks.html

Of all human vices, buying books that you would like to read but may never get around to reading is surely one of the least pernicious (at least if you can afford it).

With Go books there are additional justifications for purchasing books you won't read right away in the form of small print runs and uncertainty as to when a book might go out of print.

As is often the case, a night's sleep unlocks the brain cells. I have now remembered the word I was searching for was bibliotaph.

tsundoku might mean "book addict" concisely but I don't think it quite captures the "buying books but not reading them" sense.

From the etymological point of view (tsumu + doku) it just means piling up books, but there is an extra nuance. In Shinfuseki-ho, for example, Yasunaga says his book was designed as "Small octavo format to make it easy to carry on the train and to make it less likely to end up as tsundoku", so there is a clear implication of tsundoku meaning books you don't get round to reading.

Out of interest, I checked with Kojien but that just gives the "piling up books" sense. However, kenkyusha says (under tsundokushugi), "acquiring but laying aside books without reading them".