An Inconvenient Truth: Reading ⭐

I’ve written many times of my love of reading, but there’s also an intersection between that activity and what I assume is an ADHD-based need for completeness. Which, in this case, led to the stockpiling of paper-based books in my younger years to the stockpiling of digital content (and not just books) in more recent years. I am a collector, a hoarder, but also a completionist. I can’t have most of the James Bond books in some physical or digital collection, I have to have all the James Bond books in that collection.

This is obviously a mental health issue, but it’s one I can’t solve for myself per se, and is instead something I can only try to improve. And rationalize: Where the bookcases full of paper books we shipped back and forth across the country were both heavy and kindling for some fire that fortunately never came, I might argue that a similarly-sized digital collection of e-books and audiobooks is at least efficient. It would fit easily on my smartphone or a Kindle, devices so small that we could just carry them everywhere, and do.

But this kind of rationalization is dangerous. That content costs a lot of money, even if I did buy a lot of it on sale or whatever. Related to that is reusability. Books–whether in paper, e-book, or audiobook form–and other reading content are a bit like movies and TV shows and not at all like music in that most people read whatever content one time and then never re-read it.

Here, I am a bit of an exception in that there are books that I’ve re-read (or, on audiobook, re-listened to), perhaps even many of them. But there are far more books I read once and will never read again, or read only partially or not at all. (I’ve had similar experiences with other content, of course. The most obvious being movies, some of which I keep buying, repeatedly, in multiple formats over time, but let’s keep this to reading.)

When you’re a digital hoarder, as I guess I am, you aren’t thinking clearly when you buy a book in any form. I just love to read. So I see a book on sale and I buy it. I see a book that’s not on sale, but it’s by some author I love and/or is perhaps a new release, and I buy it. I put books (and other content) aside like a squirrel puts acorns aside for the winter, a you-never-know or just-in-case justification for a person, me, who never wants to be stuck anywhere without something to read. I mean, I used to read every inch of every side of a box of cereal each morning as a kid before I finally discovered newspapers. I really like to read.

But I also really need to rein this in.

In early May, I described my escalating monthly subscription service expenses and my desire to get out from under that in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️. And in June, I described the first major step in achieving that goal in An Inconvenient Truth: A Day of Reckoning, A Month of Savings ⭐. Among the savings, I canceled my Audible subscription after nearly 20 years because I have so much to read/listen to that it just stopped making sense to pay for that and get the one audiobook credit each month.

But there are subscriptions and there are purchases. With all the pushback against Big Tech and subscription services, there is a corresponding movement back to physical media in many cases, or at least ownership of content instead of renting it, as one does with a subscription.

That’s a big topic, one that varies dramatically by content type. But we are discussing reading here. And this is where I’m at.

I am not going to start buying paper books again, and I’m definitely not going to start reading paper magazines and periodicals either. Those formats are expensive and inconvenient and are, to me, non-starters.

I read books through the Kindle app on multiple devices, and I have a library of several hundred books that would last well past my lifetime if I set out to read them all today. I have a large audiobook library in Audible as well with the same result. These things are there, they’re available, and I can take advantage of that content (and do).

I also read each day through paid subscriptions that I’m sticking with for various reasons.

For example, as part of the Apple One subscription that benefits all four people in my family, I get Apple News+. This app has its issues, for sure, but it is also the news app I spend the most time in each morning.

I also subscribe to periodicals like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, which are mostly work-related. I can justify the expense of each for that reason, but I can also save money. So I ensure that each of these is as inexpensive as possible by cancelling when a subscription runs out and then re-subscribing with a new email address to get the best rate.

Of those, The New York Times is the most aggravating and the one I wanted to get rid of. It can be expensive, too, with the company charging me $30 per month for the subscription after whatever promotion I had been had run out. So I was going to just kill it. But when I went to unsubscribe, it offered me the same subscription at just $4 per month, which is low enough to be a no-brainer. So I ended up keeping it, and I have a calendar reminder for next year so I can reevaluate it then.

I never paid for a Kindle Unlimited subscription or whatever. But I have been buying books outright on Kindle ever since Amazon announced the first device. And that is something I need to work on for the reasons noted above. There are books I just need to buy, either because they’re industry books that I might review or whatever. But if I’m not going to read a book more than once, it should ideally be very inexpensive or, when possible, free through some local library program.

And so I set out to see what’s available to me. Some of this is specific to my situation, so you may have to look into what you can do to save money as possible when reading books.

The first thing I found was a useful email newsletter from BookBub. They send one or two emails a day, each with at least several books priced at $2 to $5 usually, up to 95 percent off, and you can personalize the mailing so you see the types of books you might want.

Since starting this free newsletter, I’ve actually bought several new books, which is bad in that squirreling away thing noted above, but also good because the most expensive book I’ve purchased was $3. That’s less than a movie rental, so it makes sense as a standalone purchase, even if it’s a one-time read. Among those purchases is World Travel by Anthony Bourdain, Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian, Don’t Swallow Your Gum by various authors, The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson and others.

I’ve also reacquainted myself with my local library and the various programs I can take advantage of with my library card. The center of this experience, at least the digital side of it, is Libby. You add your library to the app–on your phone and/or tablet–and then you can see what’s available. In my case, through my local library here in the Lehigh Valley, there’s a lot: An incredible library of books you can be loaned, of course, but also audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers. Some of this content is accessible directly in the app, but you can sync loaned books directly to Kindle and read them from there.

There are some other services that edge into this area, like Hoopla, which also links to my local library and provides access to free audiobooks, e-books, and comic books, plus movies, TV shows, and music. And some that do not, like Kanopy, which also links to my local library and provides access to free movies. But Libby is the big one.

So that’s the theory going forward. If it’s an important new book of whatever kind, I will continue buying them occasionally, but I will also populate my e-book library with cheap choices from BookBub and loan, read, listen to, or whatever else with as much content as possible through Libby and, less frequently, Hoopla. Your options will vary within the United States, and I assume there are similar opportunities elsewhere. It’s worth researching, for sure.