How many books did you read in 2008?

Will eBook readers increase America's appetite for books?

According to a survey for the AP in August 2007, 27% of Americans did not read a single book in the previous year… not one.  You wonder who these people are til you remember that statistically 50% of the people you pass on the street are below average.  Still… I mean, COME ON.  I had been wondering about this for a long time when I came across the numbers in a NYT article from 1/27/08… I had clipped it and forgotten it.  Another 27% read 15 or more books.  But here’s the real shocker (to me)… 8% of Americans read more than 51 books a year!

Now I read a lot, at least I thought I did.  A really bad year for me is 15 books… that’s what I did in 2007.  Typically though, I’ll get through around 25.  My record until this year was 41, but in 2008 I passed it and read 43.  I know this because for 30 years now, I’ve carefully written down the title of every book I read each month.  My goal was 52… one per week, and as you can see, I’m still trying.

Reading Rules

I’m pretty anal about that list.  To get on it, I have to read every bit of a book… 19 chapters out of 20 doesn’t make it, though I generally skip the Foreword.  No skimming either.  Although I’m fairly fast — I average a page a minute day in and day out — I still read every word… none of that speedreading stuff where you sort of scan a line without mentally seeing individual words.  I want to actually hear every word, if only in my mind.

Early on I had to set rules about what sort of things counted.  For instance, although I occasionally read a play or movie script, I don’t count them… they’re too short.  Figure it out.  A play or movie goes 90 minutes tops.  They’re printed roughly a page per minute of performance… that is, with all sorts of double spacing and short lines of dialog.  If you can watch a play in 90 minutes, you can read it a heck of lot faster… for me in about 45 minutes.  That’s too short to put on my list.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, I DO count, but only if I’ve done some serious backup reading and study on the play in question.  Doing that, reading the account of the period in Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People for instance, plus working through all of the word lookups, etc., turns one of Shakespeare’s histories into a long afternoon.  OK, that’s long enough to put on my list.

I also count most audio books… books on tape… audible dot com.  I load them onto my iPod and listen to them while walking the dogs or even driving.  Those books are typically 6 to 10 hours long, and that works out to a lot of pages and ergo… they make the list.  I find fiction and simple business books work well in the audio format, but books with a lot of charts and maps don’t make it.  I once read Churchill’s 6-volume History of World War II, and tried doing one of them as an audio book… it didn’t work because you couldn’t see the maps.  Most of the books I listen to, I also own in conventional paper form.

Enter the Kindle

I’ve used eBook readers before and love them.  Many years ago my wife gave me one of the early units made by RCA, I believe.  It had its faults, but I found it to be wonderfully handy.  The form factor was spectacular, and the way it fit in your hand was a marvel.  You could set bookmarks by electronically dog-earing page corners.  You could tap a word on the screen and a little window would pop up with a dictionary definition and a pronunciation guide.  You could dial the font size up and down so you could read without glasses.  In fact, in all but two ways it was an incredible little device.  The first was the memory was limited so you could only put in one book at a time.

You would think that one book is enough, but both my wife and I are used to packing a lot of books when we take off for a long weekend or more.  When I go to Reno to show horses for a week in July, we each pack a large cardboard filing box with the books we want to be available.  Not that we’ll read them… at least more than a couple… but we have no idea what we’ll be in the mood for and we want choices… a couple books of the several genres we each read.  That takes a lot of space and certainly adds a ton if we’re packing for an airplane trip.  If the eBook reader could store a dozen books or so, it would be perfect… a HUGE space and weight saver.

The other problem was that there were not many titles available, and in the end that was the killer for me.  To be really useful, you need most if not all of your books to be available in the appropriate electronic format.  The Kindle has solved both of these neatly.  You can store more books than anyone could conceivably need over the course of a month.  And, at last count, there was well over 200,000 titles available and the list was growing by leaps and bounds every day.

Sales of the Kindle were fairly slow until Oprah endorsed it around Christmas time.  That was about the same time I mentioned to my wife I’d like one for Christmas myself.  What I got was an IOU… Amazon shipments are now out to March.  OK, I can wait.  I have my iPod… currently “reading” Outliers on it.  And of course there are stacks of books… the 20th century kind… waiting for me.  This is the year… 52 books… 52… I can feel it.

I’m writing this post while stretched out on the sofa with my feet being kept warm by a very accommodating doberman named Roxy. I’m using a new x200 tablet made by Lenova and I’m writing it out with a pen cursive style. The handwriting recognition program built into Vista is converting my scrawls into text… flawlessly.

I’ve used a tablet before… the earlier x41… but it didn’t have enough horsepower and it was just too slow and made way too many errors. With the x200 it’s so good it recognizes stuff I can’t read myself. The very it does this is by making very good guesses at the words, I’m writing. And that creates a new issue. Since It never guesses an incorrectly spelled word, your “typos” are not simple misspellings but now consist of perfectly good words used incorrectly. And they can be hard to spot when you scan the resulting text.

This was brought home to me when reading Paul Gillin’s excellent book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing.” Paul dictated that book into his computer using voice  recognition software. And, sorry to say, it is filled with the same sort of typos I’m running into. Not misspellings but incorrect words. A friend, A.C. Ross, told me he was having exactly the same problem. I’m starting to develop new writing habits… watching the output of the text converter as I scribble.

I happen to be a very fast typist. I’ll always be able to type a LOT faster than I can write with a pen on the tablet. But I really like the ability to enter text while standing (or reclining). For me it’s another way of working and definitely easy to pick up. And of course there’s also the matter of just 3 lbs and 6 hours of batteries.