Two years of reading summarized
05 May 2011So I like to read… a lot. And not just books about programming or computer science, but like everything. Exactly two years ago, I started to use @deboekenlijst. It is a twitter service that builds a list of the books that you have read. So every time you have read a book, you tweet the information to that account. Once a week (or less), a website is build with statistics and an overview. This week I thought, let’s see how much I read. I’m currently in the top 10 of the most active readers:
I started on May 3 2009, the last book was entered on April 28 2011. In that period I’ve read 108 books in 104 weeks.
The analysis of my reading started with getting the information from the website, parsed it to JSON and expanded the list with books that weren’t yet analysed. After that, I added information about language and type (ebook vs dead-tree). With google charts, I build some nice charts.
44 books are ebooks, 64 are paper books. The ebooks are in ePub, Kindle and PDF format. They were read on sony’s PRS-300 and on Apple’s iPad 1. And although eInkt is very nice to read, I like the iPad more. The screen is larger and it supports more formats. Downloading and reading without the need to link it to my laptop is also very nice.
I think that ebooks are the future, and I try to buy and read them as much as possible. I do not like DRM however.
I’ve read 31 English books, the rest is in Dutch. The English books are mostly technical, although I buy some non-technical books in English too. Number of books per month
On average, I read 4 books per month. Some months were more productive, reading wise. How come?
- July 2009: two week holiday
- May 2010: two week holiday
- October 2010: the service went down (due to twitter errors), so I re-added a number of books at once
- March/April 2011: became father and had two weeks holiday
On to some more reading!