I don't really feel like I read more books before blogging. I mean, maybe I did in the sense that I had more time, and time spent blogging is possibly not time spent reading books, but I certainly don't feel like it's any harder to read a book. Rather, blogging and the internet have made me much pickier about which books I read. Think about it like this. If 20 years ago, you wanted to learn something about health care, but weren't sure you wanted to learn a whole lot about health care, what would you do. Well, you could read the newspaper, and wait for them to write things about health care, and hope that knowledge piled up over time. Or you could subscribe to magazines that would have some health care articles. Again, though, you'd have to wait till they published a health care article. Let's say you wanted to know about health care right then. Well, it was off to the library or the bookstore for you: Books were really the only way to access information-on-demand. The internet, however, has created a whole lot more information-on-demand. I can go to a health care blog. I can search out a web site devoted to health care. I can download think tank documents or Nexis my way through newspaper archives. I used to make their way through some bad books because they didn't know a better way to access information. That may have enabled some useful, associative learning, but it was also pretty inefficient. Now, however, I'm much better at finding information, and so I choose my books with more care, because there's more of an opportunity cost to reading a bad book that spends a whole lot of pages padding out the word count. All that said, I've actually been reading a lot of books lately. One thing that's helped me is Facebook's Visual Bookshelf, which lets you list what you're reading. One of my problems is getting halfway through a book then getting distracted by another book. With VB, I'm embarrassed to take unread tomes off the list, and have begun working harder to finish what I start. So in that way, the internet is actually making me a better book reader.
