It’s no secret that I read a lot. Like, a TON. I don’t always read a lot, true, but my average is 3-4 books a week. That’s about a book every 2 days, which is a lot more than most people read. I’ve received two questions regarding that fact – one of them is how I’m able to read so much, and the other is where I find all those hundreds of books to read. Well, the answer to the first question is obvious – I just pick up a book and I read it, simple as that. I don’t bother with any speed reading techniques or anything of this sort. Naturally, I read between 400 and 500 words per minute, depending on the text, which is a speed that I’m very comfortable with. At that speed, it takes me roughly 6 hours to read a 400-page novel, but again – if the text flows well and the words are relatively simple it can go faster. My “trick”, if you can even call it that, is that I dedicate roughly 2-3 hours per day to reading.
Now, the other question, which is a lot more interesting to me, is just where do I find all those books. Books are expensive! Well, yeah, they are, but they don’t have to be. The thing you have to understand about me is that I’m really not a picky reader. As long as the thing I’m reading is interesting to me, then I will read it. I don’t limit myself to Nebula-award winners or New York Times bestsellers. As a result, a lot of what I read are self-published novels that I can get for cheap or even for free. I’ve already spoken about a wonderful service called Freebooksy which sends free books to your e-mail every single day. As long as you own a Kindle (or a tablet from which you can download the Kindle app) you can access these books and read them at your leisure. Sometimes there’s some real stinkers, which is to be expected, but most are surprisingly good! And with 10-15 free books every single day, you’re bound to find at least a couple that sound really interesting to you.
The other place where I pick up my books from is Audible. Audible is the lead provider of audiobooks which has been doing an absolutely fantastic job supplying me with fresh new reads! You can purchase any book from them that you like, but if you have a subscription (about $15 a month) you receive one credit per month which you can use to get ANY book you like for free. If you love it, you can keep it, and if not, you can return it, get your credit back and find something else to listen to. I like to think of it a bit as a $15 subscription to a library of audiobooks. I can listen to them while walking to work, or while playing videogames, and that way I knock out a few more titles per week.
And the best part is that sometimes Freebooksy and Audible combine in awesome way! Sometimes, if you own the Kindle edition of a book, you can get the audiobook from Audible for next to nothing (something like $2-3). And when you get the Kindle edition for free from Freebooksy, well, buying the audiobook for super cheap is like an offer you can’t refuse. You can buy a book for the price of a cup of coffee. How awesome is that?