There is a Japanese word that has no clean equivalent in English. Tsundoku (積ん読) describes the act of acquiring books and letting them pile up, unread, on shelves, tables, floors and any other available surface. It is not a criticism. It is an observation. A recognition of a behaviour so universal that an entire culture built a word around it. The person who buys books faster than they read them is not failing. They are performing a very specific, very human act of optimism. Every unread book is a promise to a future self who will have the time, the focus, the mood. That future self almost never arrives. But the buying continues.
Now translate this to the screen in front of you. The browser with too many tabs. The Pocket account you stopped opening. The Instagram saves folder that became a graveyard. The Spotify playlists titled "listen later" that you created in 2021 and have never pressed play on. The Netflix queue that would take three months of continuous viewing to clear. The YouTube watch-later list that grows by five videos a day and shrinks by none. We are all practising tsundoku now. We just do not have a word for it yet.
The digital pile
The scale of digital tsundoku is staggering. Browser tabs have become a form of ambient anxiety. The person with 47 tabs open is not multitasking. They are maintaining a physical manifestation of everything they intended to read, watch, buy, or think about and never quite got around to. Each tab is a small act of hope pinned to a toolbar. Close them and you close the possibility. So they stay. They multiply. The browser slows down. The fan on the laptop starts whirring. And still, you open another.
Read-later apps were supposed to solve this. Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise, Matter. They promised to rescue content from the tyranny of the timeline and store it somewhere calm and organised where you would return to it on a Sunday morning with a clear head. But they did not solve the problem. They relocated it. Instead of 47 tabs, you now have 47 tabs AND 2,000 articles saved in an app you feel guilty about not opening. The pile did not shrink. It just moved to a different room.
The same pattern plays out everywhere. Bookmarked tweets you will never scroll back to find. Saved TikToks that disappeared into a folder you forgot existed. Newsletters you subscribed to with genuine enthusiasm and now delete on autopilot without opening. Podcasts queued in an app that shows a number so high you stopped looking at it. The digital pile is everywhere, and it is growing faster than any individual's capacity to consume it.
Aspiration vs attention
Here is what makes digital tsundoku interesting from a strategy perspective. The gap between what people save and what people consume is not a bug. It is a signal. It is one of the most revealing data points about human behaviour that most brands completely ignore.
When someone saves an article about learning to code, they are not committing to learning to code. They are expressing a desire to be the kind of person who learns to code. When someone adds a documentary about climate change to their Netflix list, they are not planning to watch it on Tuesday evening. They are signalling an aspiration. They want to be informed, engaged, thoughtful. They want to care about the right things. The save is the performance of that desire. The consumption is optional.
This is a profound insight for anyone thinking about audiences, customers, or users. People's aspirational identities drive their saving behaviour. Their actual identities drive their consumption behaviour. And the gap between those two identities is enormous. It is the space where brands build loyalty, where content creators build audiences, and where products either understand their users or fundamentally misjudge them.
The person who saved your long-form article about sustainable fashion is not necessarily going to read it. But they told you something valuable by saving it. They told you who they want to be. That information is worth more than a pageview.
The value of the pile
The conventional framing of digital hoarding treats the pile as a problem. Too many tabs means you are disorganised. Too many unread articles means you lack discipline. The unfinished Netflix queue is a failure of follow-through. This framing is wrong. It misunderstands what the pile actually is.
The pile is a self-portrait. It is the most honest map of someone's interests, aspirations, and curiosities that exists. More honest than their social media profile, which is curated for public consumption. More honest than their purchase history, which is constrained by budget. More honest than what they tell a market researcher, which is filtered through what they think the right answer is. The pile is the unedited version. It is every impulse, every fascination, every "I should know more about this" captured in real time.
If you could see the totality of someone's digital tsundoku, you would know them better than their closest friends do. You would see the documentary about Japanese woodworking next to the article about startup funding next to the podcast about Stoic philosophy next to the recipe for sourdough they saved in 2020. No coherent narrative. No personal brand. Just a messy, genuine, unfiltered record of everything that ever caught their attention for long enough to save it.
Building for accumulators
Most digital products treat accumulation as a failure state. Read-later apps show you how many unread articles you have as if that number is supposed to motivate you. Podcast apps display your queue length like a to-do list. Email clients badge the unread count in red, the colour of urgency, the colour of things going wrong. All of these design choices share the same assumption: the ideal user is the one who clears their queue. The pile should be zero.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people actually behave. People are accumulators. They always have been. The only thing that changed is the medium. A bookshelf full of unread books does not fill the owner with guilt. It fills them with possibility. It is a physical manifestation of all the thinking they could do, all the worlds they could enter, all the knowledge they could absorb. The books are not waiting to be read. They are waiting to be wanted. And some of them will wait forever, and that is fine.
The products that understand this will win. Instead of shaming users for their growing piles, they should celebrate the pile. Analyse it. Surface patterns in it. Show users what their accumulation reveals about them. The question should never be "why haven't you read this yet?" The question should be "what does the fact that you saved this tell you about yourself?"
This is exactly the thinking behind Trove. Not a read-later app that nags you about your backlog. A taste engine that treats every save as a signal. The pile is the input. The insight is the output. Your tsundoku is not a problem to be solved. It is data to be understood.
The culture of infinite saves
We live in the first era where saving something costs nothing. No shelf space, no weight, no physical limit. A Victorian book collector was constrained by the size of their house, the depth of their pocket, the capacity of their shelves. A digital collector has no such limits. You can save infinitely, and so you do. The friction that once forced curation has been removed. And without that friction, the pile becomes oceanic.
This is not a crisis. It is a cultural shift worth understanding rather than fixing. The instinct to save, to accumulate, to build a personal library of things that matter to you is one of the most fundamentally human behaviours there is. It predates the internet by centuries. Tsundoku was named in the Meiji era. Commonplace books, those personal anthologies of quotes and ideas, date back to the Renaissance. The pile has always existed. The internet just made it weightless, which made it infinite, which made it impossible to ignore.
The challenge for this generation is not to consume more. It never was. The challenge is to develop a better relationship with accumulation itself. To stop treating the unread as a failure and start treating it as a map. To look at the pile not with guilt but with curiosity. What does this collection of intentions say about the person who assembled it? What patterns emerge when you step back far enough to see the whole shape?
Your 47 tabs are not a sign of chaos. They are a sign of appetite. Your overflowing read-later queue is not a to-do list you are failing at. It is the most complete record of your curiosity that exists anywhere. And the Netflix list you will never finish is not wasted time. It is aspiration, captured and catalogued, waiting patiently for a future self who may never arrive but whose existence you refuse to stop believing in.
That is tsundoku. And it is not a problem. It is a portrait.
