I think it really depends on what type of book it is. I haven't read anything truly ancient, but for example I don't find the early Agatha Christie books from the 20s to be slow paced, or Isaac Asimov books from the 50s. I do find most old fantasy to be AGONIZINGLY slow to the point of unreadability.

Not only the paper, there's no warehouse, no shipping, no store overhead, no staff, no allowance for a certain percentage of damaged books, literally NOTHING that should bring the cost up.

Agreed. It's blatant gouging.

Yes, I'm pretty sure we all know that the library exists, lol.

I'm used to new releases being a little on the higher end, like $16 or $17 sometimes, but JFC $30+ is steep for a digital file.

I've been pretty shocked lately to see $30 eBooks for some new releases. What the ever loving fuck is that about? It's a digital file!

This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi

The Ivory Tomb by Melissa Caruso

Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett

I mean, listening and reading are just objectively two different things. If you decide they're the same, you immediately run into all sort of logistical impossibilities. If listening is reading, a two year old who has not learned to read yet can now somehow read. So can an illiterate person, and heck, maybe even a dog if you made a simple enough audiobook that consisted of mainly words dogs commonly know.

If your definition of reading means 1. an illiterate person can read, 2. a two year old who has not started school yet can read, and 3. a dog can read, your definition is just obviously wrong.

It's a new thing where people just decide words mean whatever they want them to mean because feelings.

I'm not career oriented, but corporate muckity-mucks/higher-ups tend to read a lot and like talking about books in my experience, and I often end up discussing mutual books with those types of people. Someone who was career-oriented could probably leverage those sorts of connections into career growth.

Personally, reading has not affected my career, but I am the opposite of ambitious/career-oriented.

I've only kept good records since 2021 unfortunately - I made my best guess after the fact at what I read for 2020, but definitely missed a lot, and have a massive pile of books where I really have no clue what year I read them. But anyway:

2020: 102

2021: 475

2022 so far: 378

I set a 365 book goal since it's a nice round number (a book a day!), but I don't really care if I read this many versus that many.

Jack Campbell's Pillars of Reality series. I was literally finishing one and not even getting out of my seat before starting the next one. Same with Cassandra Gannon's Wicked Ugly Bad series. And Karen Robards's Charlotte Stone series. And Anne Bishop's Others series.

I usually have one fiction and one nonfiction on the go at any given time, though sometimes I end up with two fictions if one of them is a physical book, because I really don't like carting heavy books around with me. I normally only read physical books at home, and prefer e-books. So I read between one and three books at any time.

If you want good Goodreads recommendations, you need to create custom shelves and also enter a lot of books. My recommendations are pretty good now - the difference between, say, my custom Fantasy shelf versus the general Fantasy genre recommendations is night and day.

Usually it's based on library due dates, but I make exceptions for new releases and stuff I'm really hyped for. What I usually do is put together a reading list for the week on Saturday night, with a mix of different types of stuff, and then pick from there on a day to day basis.

My library has something called Daisy for some books, which I believe is basically a combination ebook/audiobook. Maybe yours does as well?

I prefer reading digitally for everything except books with a lot of pictures. It's just such a better experience, especially with very large/heavy books. Adjusting the line spacing is a big one for me for comfort - I really struggle to read the smaller size of paperbacks because the squashed lines give me eyestrain (the larger "trade paperbacks" are fine). I'm also a minimalist/environmentalist and don't want to kill a tree, and I don't generally reread books.

I guess it depends on reading speed and book length, but if an audiobook is 16 hours, I could read at least four normal books in that time (I recently read three books on a twelve hour flight). I would not be able to read anywhere near the volume of books I do now if I used audiobooks.

I feel personally attacked by this question, as someone who regularly stays up way too late on weeknights to finish a book and has to get up early for work.

Reading and sleeping are definitely not good friends with each other in my life.

I've been a Kobo user for many years, reading on the Clara model now for about the last 18 months and loving it. It stands up very well to extremely heavy usage (400 books a year). I have Kobo Plus as well for now and have been finding a lot of good reads on there.

"I don't like these books for X reason" is at least as useful as all the other comments that are just "I don't like these books, for some unknown reason I'm not going to share"

No. I'm normally not much of a fan of literary or woke books, and those dominate most of the big awards. Ooga ooga I'm a barbarian I guess.

I read fast and spend a lot of time reading. Book length is all over the place because I read a big mix of stuff.