Back in February this year I wrote a post about my goals for the 2014 Goodreads Reading Challenge. As part of that post I speculated that, despite 2013 showing a great uptick in how much I was reading, 2014 might not maintain the pace.

Well, the year is almost finished and I think it’s fair to say that I pretty solidly surpassed my goal. The initial reading target was 20 books. This was admittedly a number I thought I shouldn’t have any trouble reading. I just wasn’t sure if I would end up reading at the same pace this year and it seemed like a sensible target. So I made it to 20 some months back, and decided to raise the target to 22. At the time I wasn’t reading as fast as I had been at the start of the year, so a small increase felt reasonable. I hit that target as well before too long.

As I write this there are less than ten days left in 2014. I’ve “finished” 29 books so far this year, and there is a good chance I’ll finish another before the year is done. I put quotes around the word finished because one of those book I’d read part of in 2013. It still counts as far as I’m concerned. Including that book this year is fine because next year I’ll no doubt include one or more that I read part of this year. It all works out in the end. I think I’ve read more words this year than last year but I’m not sure it would be by a whole lot, as a few of this years books were on the small side.

Has the Kindle still got it?

Absolutely. I read a few physical books this year because they were manga that I couldn’t get digitally, but everything else was digital, and on the Kindle. I even spent $17 of my own money to read a book for work that I could have read for free if I’d been willing to read the hard cover book work was offering. I just don’t want to read physical books anymore. I’m currently using a first generation Kindle Paperwhite but I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new Kindle Voyage when it becomes available in Australia. It will be pricey and unnecessary, but it think it will make for a slightly nicer experience and iron out couple of small issue I have with the Paperwhite.

Reading on the Kindle is still enjoyable and “cool”. I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely lose the feeling I get when I stop and think about having a digital book reader and all that it brings with it. That is probably the result of growing up and doing a lot of reading prior to such a thing existing. I image that most kids growing up with these devices won’t tend to see them in quite the same way. Like smart phones and tablets, it will just be the way things have always been.

Next Years Target?

At this point I feel similarly about next year as I did about this year, so I’m planning to set my target at 20 books again. I don’t look at the challenge as a way to stretched myself, but rather as a way to look back at the year and be happy with how much I read. If I can read another 20 books this year then I won’t be disappointed.

Last year I started to really make good on an on-again-off-again goal of the past several years, in which I wanted to try to read more. I read a lot as a teenager, and even in the first half a decade after highschool finished, but with the advent of the modern internet and working a full time job my reading rate had fallen to what must have been maybe a handful of books a year, probably less.

It begins…

I bought myself a Kindle 4 in early January 2012 and that was the start of getting back into reading. I’m not sure how many books I read in 2012, but it was more than I had done for some years leading up to that point and I give much of the credit for that to the Kindle. It helped make reading something I wanted to do again (even now I still think it’s a cool gadget) and that mental barrier was probably the biggest hurdle. The fact that I no longer had to hold a physical book open with two hands was also nice.

2013: The pace quickens

At some point (I can’t remember when) I started using www.goodreads.com to track the physical books I still had, along with a record of books I’d read, either in the past or going forward. Along with this tracking came the data to let me know how many books I was getting through. In 2013 that number was 24 books. They weren’t all of the size I would have tended to read as a teenager, but I still feel that to be a pretty good accomplishment given how far I’d fallen in the last decade.

Goodread’s runs a reading challenge each year, where people indicate the number of books they plan to read during the course of the year and then get an automatic progress indicator as they read and record books in the goodreads system throughout the year. A simple thing, but handy if you are the type who like to challenge yourself, or perhaps just like to gather data and see statistics .

2014: The pace…slows?

I became aware of the challenge in 2013 but didn’t take part. However I’m taking part in the 2014 challenge. I’ve set myself a target of 20 books. I’m not looking to challenge last years record, I just want to read a number that will be high enough that I can look at it and feel happy that I did a solid amount of book reading over the span of the year. I also want a number that is low enough that I feel I should be able to do it without too much trouble. Easy task = less likely to avoid it. 20 books is only 1.66 of a book each month, so I shouldn’t have any trouble reaching my goal. As I write this it is approaching the middle of February and I’ve already finished four books this year, and should have a couple more done by the end of this month, so I’m already ahead.

I’ve little idea of what will happen in the year ahead, but I can at least be reasonably confident that I’ll be able to come out at the end of the year happy with how much reading I did. And that’s what this is all about really.

Back in early 2012 I wrote a post about how I had noticed that I was reading more books since I had bought my iPad. Now a bit more than a year later I thought it might be worth revisiting that and think about what has changed.

Am I Still Using My iPad?

Absolutely. After my work laptop (where I obviously spend many hours a week working) it’s the device that I spend the most time using. All the time I used to spend on my computer reading articles has been translated to the iPad. I’d say I spend at least a couple hours a day using my iPad, often more, especially on weekends. So I’m still reading a lot of web content these days (though probably a little less than when I wrote the previous post) and I’m still doing it on my iPad. It really is an excellent device for that kind of activity.

Am I Still Reading Books on My iPad?

No, but it’s not because I stopped reading ebooks. I decided to get myself a Kindle as I’d been interested in trying one out for some time, and, just as many people before me, I have found it to be an excellent device for reading ebooks. I was happy enough reading books on my iPad but the Kindle is just much more convenient, because:

• It’s small enough to hold comfortably in one hand
• The battery life is much longer than that of a tablet so you don’t need to think about charging it much. I can go about a month between charging and thinking about doing it again, which is great.
• I used the Kindle reader app on my iPad but it didn’t have the store aspect build into it. The Kindle does, which makes it that little bit more convenient when I want to download another book.
• Being a standalone device I can sit down and read without feeling the itch to switch to another app and do something. That wasn’t ever really a big problem for me but there are so many thing besides reading a book that I could be doing, so it’s nice to have a reading environment with just a little bit less temptation to do something else.

Reading In General

My book reading goal for 2012 was eight books, which isn’t a lot but it was more than I had been getting through in previous years. I ended up going well over on that goal. I started reading 21 novels or short stories and completed 17, of which two were short stories. I may never get around to finishing some of the books I started and didn’t finish because they just didn’t hold my attention.

In the last post I thought that the two main reasons why I was reading more with my iPad around were because it was convient and because I thought it was cool. I they both still hold up, though the coolness has now shifted to my Kindle since that is where all my book reading happens. Convenience is always an important factor, but idea that something is just plain neat is always a good motivator and I’m still finding that to be the case even after having a Kindle for over a year now.

The advantages and disadvantages that I mentioned in may last post still stand, and nothing has really changed there. Amazon does have some kind of lending facility in place now for customers who have a Prime membership, but as far as I know that isn’t available in Australia. Even if it was I’m not sure I’d get it. For the $70+ dollars a year it would likely cost I could buy a half dozen books and I don’t go through them all that quickly. For those in the US who have Prime for quicker deliveries I guess it’s just a bonus that they can borrow books as well, but I don’t think I’d bother with it simply so that I could borrow in the first place, not unless I was reading a lot more books than I am.

The Future (again)

I see myself continuing to read at about the same pace I am currently, which means I’ll probably still be able to knock off around a dozen books a year. That’s hardly a voracious pace of reading, but it’s a pace that I’ll be happy to be able to achieve. It’s quick enough that I should feel like I’m getting something done and quick enough that I should be able to get to most of the books I think I’d like to read in a somewhat timely fashion.