Michelle over at CO/OB has decided to take on a project where she reads a book a week (which I think is absolutely insane). While there isn’t a chance in hell that I’d attempt it, the whole impossibility of the idea got my brain trying to think of ways to make it at least theoretically possible.

The first thing that I could see this project doing would be injecting 452 million of my hard earned dollars directly into the coffers of my local bookstore or the local library’s late fee account. As nice as it would be to have a wing or possibly even a coffee drink named after me, I just couldn’t see living out of a shopping cart to read 52 books. The first thing that I thought that I would need would be a healthy supply of free books. I think I might check…

• Bartleby.com
• Bibliomania
• Chicago’s Naperville Public Library E-books
• Internet Public Library
• Literature.org
• Mass State Library E-books
• Pagebypagebooks
• Project Gutenberg
• U Penn’s Online Library
• U Virginia Free E-Books

This is just a small subset of what is available out there, although a lot of them are frustratingly reliant on works that are out of copyright (read: over 100 years old). The Mass State and Chicago libraries should offer more modern titles in downloadable form.

After I had compiled my list of free books, the only other major obstacle to reading a book per week (besides the necessary desire and attention span) would be my horribly slow reading speed. I might read this article on Speed reading techniques, which offers some great points to increasing reading speed without losing comprehension or skimming (by far the most effective of which seems to be the elimination of the little voice in my head that reads along with me). I might also dramatically increase my reading speed relatively effortlessly with zapreader. Then again, if I were really smart, I might read the speed reading article with zapreader. Go, brain, GO!

The basic concept behind zapreader is that it sequentially flashes the words of a selected text at a speed that you control. It defaults to 300 words per minute (that’s 5 words per second), which initially was enough to make me feel like I was going insane. After getting over the initial shock, I found that there was no way that the voice in my head could keep up, so it stopped trying. And once it did, I easily jumped to about 600 WPM. And once I got used to reading by absorbing words projected in a single spot rather than jumping line to line as I would on a page, I found that I could bump to about 725 WPM without any loss in comprehension.

The way zapreader works is that you save the Zapreader Bookmarklet to your favorites. Whenever you highlight text on a page and then click the bookmarklet, the text is fed into zapreader.

If I could then feed full e-books into zapreader, I should be able to theoretically plow through books, leaving me four spare days per week to dedicate to writing crap on the interweb, rather than reading it.

Posted in Books