Are two completly different and sometimes overlaping hobbies.
I used to buy books like I used to buy PlayStation 2 games. Every saturday I used to buy 2 or 3 games, it reached a point where I had over 300 games but played the same 10 at most.
Like wise with books, I used to buy whatever grabbed my attention and I have a library full of books I have zero intention to read.
When I got my first Kindle back in 2011, the physical book lost its shine for me, it was now about reading the book and I became more serious about what books to buy. Not buying anything that seemed even a little bit interesting, I had to start to think about what I was really going to enjoy.
For me buying books and reading them are two different things.
This is not a problem for me because if I allow myself to buy books on any regular basis, I’ll have a million books and likely not read them all. Basically, this would be a problem for me, but I recognize it enough to not let it happen.
For me, I put a lot of things on my wish list/to read eventually list and it just gross and gross because I can only read so fast.
I do think browsing for books is a completely different hobby from reading books, whether you’re bookmarking them or buying them. It’s similar to other hobbies. I live cross stitch and sometimes spend a ton of time browsing patterns, bookmarking the ones I like, making plans in my head to make these things, yet I haven’t picked up a needle in a month or more.
I think we can consider this a side effect of having everything at our fingertips. Everything is available to us and it’s easy to dream that there’s enough time in the world to read all the things and make all the things, but there’s not.