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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

After graduating college at the age of 22, I've read between 20-50 books every year.

I'm often surprised at how far ahead of the bell curve I am. I am very rarely able to have a conversation about literature with people in real life. If I'm lucky enough to find someone that's read a recently published book I've also read then they often haven't read anything else by the same author. Or they haven't read the influences the author had for the book. Or they aren't aware of the genre trends the book took part in.

Reading in America is a lonely hobby sometimes.

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When I was younger I would read ten to twenty books a year, of all genres. As I've gotten older it's dropped to one to two, entirely history books. Part of the problem is discoverability. There's too much stuff, and places like Goodreads aren't good at sorting through them. Since most things get limited physical releases these days you don't find them at book stores or libraries like you used to. I also refuse to support Amazon in any way because I'd rather give the money to the authors directly. Problem with that is the only way to do that most of the time is with pre-orders or drops, and by the time I found out about these authors or that particular work those are long since over.

Goodreads discoverability seems pretty good to me. I'm constantly finding new books through their recommended algo, front page, curated lists and search. What else could they do to improve that?

For example, if I wanted find more beatnik related books (after reading On The Road) I search lists and find this fantastic community scored collection with more books than I'll ever want to read on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/89976.Beatniks

A big problem for me is I can't just open to a random page and start reading to see if it's worthwhile. I have to jump over to Google Books, and that can be iffy as to whether or not they have samples I can read. Google Books also isn't good about searching by title, and I often have to use the author's name in combination or search by ISBN, and I don't always have those. Google Books does have the useful facet of searching by release, so if a book's been re-released under a new publisher or with a new foreword or something it'll tell me that.

I maybe used to read 30+ books a year. (And subscribed to a lot of magazines.) I’m not sure I read many fewer words these days but I read far fewer books—maybe 5-10.

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