Simple ways to read 5X more books

In my life I have known no wise people who don't read all the time. None. Zero.

Charlie Munger, Co-Founder of Berkshire Hathaway.

Reading books is a core skill required for success. Most people, however, don't read. There are over 140M books that have been published in the history of mankind. However, some statistics suggest that less than 0.5% of people in the world read more than 3-5 books a year. There might be many reasons why people don't read nearly enough. Perhaps, they lack time. Perhaps, they have limited attention spans. Perhaps, they are just too intimidated to start. Or they start but can't continue!

I used to be one of those folks. I would probably read about 3-5 books a year. However, I've picked up some tips and tricks over the years and now read about 40-50 books per year! As I reflected on my reading skills, I figured there were a few "Aha!" moments along the journey that helped me read both effectively and efficiently.

Caveat: My learnings mostly apply to non-fiction books!

#1 Is the book worth reading?

Start with reading reviews of the book on your favorite site. An app/site like Goodreads helps further since it has personalised reviews by your friends and business acquaintances.

Secondly, podcasts have now become a great medium for marketing books. Most authors have now started using popular podcasts to talk about their work. Listen to the podcast even before you can pick up the book. For example, Bill Gates recently recommended the "Better Angels of Our Nature" by Steven Pinker. I immediately searched for a podcast by the author and sure enough found this podcast and this TED talk. Not only did it help me decide whether to read the book, but it also served as a great summary.

Finally, one of the biggest stumbling blocks for reading is picking up something you just don't connect with or don't enjoy. I'm not proposing you shouldn't read a dense book or an alien topic. I'm proposing that as you are building your reading 'muscle', err on the side of picking up things you are truly going to enjoy.

Addendum courtesy of readers comments: You can look for Book Summaries on Slideshare and Blinkist! Another great suggestion to have an active to-read book list.

#2 Binge on the Kindle ecosystem - Purchase a Kindle and/or get the free Kindle app to start with. This helps at multiple levels. Books are easy to procure and are priced much more attractively. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of joy in reading a book in print, and who doesn’t love the smell, weight and feel of a physical book. However, I now only buy the hard copies for the 'best' ones, often after I've read them already. Those are the ones I want to put on my bookshelf for posterity.

Remember carrying music pre- the iPod and smartphone era? The Kindle makes it a breeze to carry multiple books around. There are several other side benefits.

In your book evaluation process, you can also send yourself a "free chapter" of the Kindle book and have a quick look. This will give you a sense for the book, the author's style of writing and even reinforce (or not!) the reviews you may have read. There is another benefit.

You may not be in the mood to read a particular book through the end. I find this to be another stumbling block. To be able to switch to reading another book is an amazing benefit.

Reading multiple books in the "same" time frame helps you read continuously and avoid monotony.

Of course, the downside of this hack is some books won't get finished, ever! Well, that's much better than you stopping to read all together since you got "stuck" on one book and got out of the reading habit.

Speed reading hack: Read the popular highlights - these are excerpts from the book that have been highlighted often. This gives you a quick sense of the entire book in a matter of minutes even before you start reading. For example, the following are the popular highlights from the Inner Game of Tennis.

Once you are done reading the book, you end up also implicitly saving your notes for the future. You can also export all your highlights using several apps.

Extra Credit: The Kindle highlights web application also has crude but very useful feature called Daily Review.

It basically serves up flashcards from books you've read and asks you to annotate them in your language. These notes further help you retain more about the book.

#3 Listen to books

The audio revolution is truly here. Thanks to sites like Audible, you can listen to books during your commute, travel, while exercising or during any other down time. Reading is clearly faster than listening to books. However, for the "average" reader, my suspicion is that it won't be worse than 50-100%. And it is much better than not consuming the book at all.

Secondly, in many non-fiction books, once you have read the summary, seen the popular highlights, you can also listen at 1.5X or even 2X through portions of the book. As mentioned earlier, you can also look to see if there's a podcast or any other TED talk that effectively summarises the book.

#4 Read consistently

The number one trick to consuming more books and retaining more is to read regularly. I use read and listen synonymously here. Like they say, once you start reading even for 2-3 hours a week, you won't ever look back.

Please do share your thoughts on reading more effectively in the comments below.

(Amit is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. Find his other blogs on LinkedIn and tweets here @amitsomani)