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Comment by mapleoin | Hacker News Reader

> They've been read over a thousand books by the age of 5.

I'd really like to hear more about that. Did you mean that literally? How would you even acquire that many books?

Our library has a program to read 1,000 books before Kindergarten (age 5 or so), and the kids get prizes along the way.

It's easier than you might expect - the books are all short picture books at that age, so it's easy to just sit and read 5 at a time. Also if you read the same book 40 times, then it counts 40 times - so it's not 1,000 unique books (although we probably have read 1,000 unique books by now too). We also read 2 or 3 books every night before bedtime, so that adds up quickly.

Our library doesn't have any checkout limit, so we just get 30 at a time and go back once every week or two.

With a library card, most likely.

Although we have a lot of toddler/kids books ourselves, probably 100-150 (a lot inherited from nieces/nephews), the majority are from the library. Our local branch has a fairly extensive kids/toddler section. There are a fair number of repeats. My son loved Violet the Pilot, we read it every day for a couple of weeks.

Still sounds a bit much. But let's have some fun with napkin math: Assuming you started reading to them when they were 2, then you'd have three years to read. To get to 1000 books that would be almost one book a day. You'd have to go to the library twice a week unless your library let you lend 7 books at once. I think most libraries only allow you to lend out 3 books at a time.

Maybe this is just Soviet Canada silliness, but when our daughter was tiny we were literally checking out 20 books (small, could be read in 15-20 minutes) once a week, and there didn't seem to be any limit at all, that we ran into at least.

We were reading to my daughter when she was an infant and had no idea what was going on, every night, 2 to 3 books a night, and we carried that habit well into 4 or 5 years old, so I have no doubt we passed 1000 books. When she was older she had a few faves that we returned to, but mostly we were constantly getting new material

A kids picture book can take 5-10 minutes to read tops. It's not all that hard to go through 10 a day.

As for lending, I've have 55 books out right now. (Seattle area library system, son just turned 6) Sounds like you need to get to the library :)

Our library doesn't have a limit, we get 30 at a time usually.

Ah, the perils of socialism.

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