About

Media Tsundoku is an essay about the art of saving things you will never consume. "Tsundoku" is the Japanese word for acquiring books and letting them pile up unread, and the site argues that we all do it digitally now: 47 open tabs, 2,000 bookmarks, 300 unread newsletters.

The essay covers what tsundoku is, the digital version, the numbers, the psychology of digital hoarding, a taxonomy of digital hoards (the Tab Hoarder, the Bookmark Graveyard, the Newsletter Collector, the Screenshot Librarian, the Playlist Maximalist and Read-Later Purgatory), and the cure: intentional curation. It ends with a love letter to the pile.

Interactive parts

The page includes a Tsundoku Score calculator (adjust sliders for open tabs, unread newsletters, bookmarks, read-later habits and your podcast queue to get a score out of 100), a personal tsundoku tracker and a 7-day declutter challenge. You can sign up to the newsletter for the extended declutter email course.

Who made it

Media Tsundoku is built by Mike Litman and published by Cultural Capital Labs, a London studio building products and writing at the intersection of taste, technology and culture. It sits alongside related projects such as You Are What You Save and Trove.

Get in touch

Responses and corrections are welcome via the contact page. Read how the site handles data on the privacy page.