[axlprose]

by previewing/skimming them first?

I don't get how this is some big black/white issue. You don't have to finish every book you start, nor do you only have to read a single book at a time, and you can listen to audiobooks at high speeds if time is your main concern. Because in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it and gotten enough of a broad overview of what it contains to decide for yourself.

I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years, and that's only counting the ones I actually finish. Yet I'm sure the tally of books I've only started/skimmed would be significantly higher than that if I bothered to keep track of it.

[jodrellblank]

It's a big issue because "There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe." - Forbes.

You aren't going to preview / skim literally millions of books which exist to find the ones worth reading. You can't.

I've managed to read about 60-90 books a year for the last 6 years

That's, what, 8 hours worth of book publishing in the USA, in 6 years?

[axlprose]

I clearly stated:

> in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it

Meaning that there would be no actual trade-off in the time invested for you, to take a slightly less superficial approach when evaluating books.

To compare the approach I proposed to a literally impossible task of evaluating every single book ever written (as if anybody would actually even be interested in reading all that) is quite disingenuous. This entire HN thread and article are already excluding most books in existence anyway, by the simple fact that everyone here has been mostly talking about "english non-fiction" books specifically. They may still tally up to a large number, but there's no point in exaggerating their quantity when we're all still just as hopeless in trying to read them all anyway. All you did by pointing out this impossibility is just needlessly restate the obvious, and has nothing to do with what I said.

I'm already more than satisfied with the amount of books I read, and get a lot out of them without experiencing any existential anguish over it, so I don't understand why you're trying to throw my reading habits back at me as if they're "not good enough" or something all of a sudden. Or is that what reading is about these days? a mere measuring contest? Am I supposed to feel ashamed I didn't meet some internet stranger's arbitrary criteria for a habit that's supposed to benefit me? I proposed a viable alternative for evaluating books that works more efficiently for me than the one presented in the article, in case others are unsatisfied with their current reading habits. I didn't claim it was something that was going to win you the "reading olympics". If anything, I clearly supported the opposite by emphasizing that people should feel less obligated to finish the books they start, because feeling like you have to finish them is just going to cause needless anxiety about the way you've invested your time.

Besides, who cares if your entire lifetime of reading could've been published in a day? Is your goal in life to out-pace authors and publishers, or is it to get fulfillment out of books? Because in my experience, reading a single chapter out of a bad/mediocre book is a lot more fulfilling than reading a bunch of amazon/goodreads reviews.