I saw a question posted on LinkedIn recently about reading habits, and it got me thinking about how my purchase of a Kindle years ago unexpectedly increased the amount of reading I do.

Mind you, that wasn’t at all the reason for the purchase. My wife and I got Kindles at the same time, and the primary reason was simply to slow down our prolific purchases of good old-fashioned books. We both love books, and we’d collected more and more through the many years of our marriage, filling multiple bookcases along the way.

We also moved around quite a bit, and with each move the books were packed into dozens of boxes that then had to be unpacked in our new home, and loaded again into those numerous bookcases. That was quite a pain.

But it just got to a point where too much wall space was being taken up by bookcases. My wife and I both love libraries, but we don’t necessarily want to live in one.

So we got ourselves Kindles. And yes indeed, our purchase of physical books tapered off noticeably. A success!

I quickly noticed a couple other things.

First, there’s a huge number of books available on Kindle for free or for very little money, books that are very well worth reading but which I doubt I’d have ever read in real book format. The complete works of HP Lovecraft… the Warlord of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs… the collected writings of John Muir… the complete works of Jack London… memoirs by trappers in the Old West, gold prospectors during the Klondike rush, and scouts for the British during the Boer Wars… and dozens of first-hand accounts by those who fought and won WWII, whether infantry grunts, sailors, bomber crewmen, tankers, submariners, or fighter pilots. And on, and on, and on…

Second, the Kindle is fantastic for reading in the middle of the night, which was a tremendous boon for me, a lifelong insomniac. I turn the brightness down low, park it on my bedside table, and when I wake up in the middle of the night nobody else is awake to disturb me, and my wife can sleep on peacefully right there next to me while I read until I’m ready to go back to sleep.

The combination of these things has been tremendous. I read probably two to three times as much now as I did pre-Kindle. And I read a lot before.