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I’ve come to a conclusion: my ability to predict my future reading tastes, preferences, and available time is rather poor.

I have a number of ebooks on my Kindle app that I just haven’t gotten around to, and one or two actual print books that I’ve been planning to read. The thing is, the purchases were well-intentioned. At the time of purchase, I did want to read each and every one of them. But good intentions only go so far – and there are a bunch of books sitting there unread.

And “unread books” almost always means “unread books I paid money for”.

I’ve been looking at my process of acquiring and reading books, and I’ve decided to leverage some available technology to simplify my reading situation in 2014.

All-In On Kindle / Digital

I’ve already been doing pretty much all my reading on my Kindle app. People have done countless articles about why they prefer ebooks, and I’m not going to reiterate all the arguments here – but for me the ability to increase print size is the major factor that pushes me firmly into the ebook camp. Ebooks + mediocre eyesight = win!

This year I’ll be leveraging the technologies that are already built-in to the Kindle platform to (hopefully!) save money, read more, and waste less time. This is going to translate to:

I’ll make aggressive use of the free previews. All Kindle ebooks have the ability to download a sample of the book at no cost. I’ll be using this to weed out books that are in the “maybe, maybe not” reading category – and maybe even to see if my perceived “must read” books are as good as I think they’ll be. You can tell a lot from the first few pages of a book.

I’ll use my Amazon wishlists to track Kindle books I want to read. It’s easy to create a private list, and easy to add Kindle books to that list. That should help with my “which book was that again?” memory issues.

I’ll put fewer books “on hold”. I have a number of books I’ve started but never finished, and I should work through those before I go buying more. This doesn’t mean I can’t abandon a bad book, but I at least need to be intellectually honest with myself about it. Am I not reading it because it’s bad, or because I just forgot about it?

I’ll use the Kindle Lending Library when appropriate. Anybody who subscribes to Amazon Prime (which my wife and I do, mainly for Instant Video) can “borrow” one book per month from a selection of Kindle titles. I’ll use that to read books that I don’t anticipate having to reference later.

And most importantly….

I’ll only buy a book at the moment I want to read it. There’s generally no reason that you’d have to buy a Kindle book ahead of the time you want to start reading it. As long as you have Internet access, it only takes half a minute or so to go grab it – especially if you already have the sample on your device!

Exceptions, “What Ifs”, Etc….

Of course all rules and procedures have some exceptions. I can think of two that apply here.

If it’s a book that I want to read, and it’s free for a limited time. The money-saving benefit I’m going for is predicated on the fact that spending any money on an unread book is a waste. It’s quite literally impossible to waste money on a free book, so if a book I want to read is “free for the next two days” or something like that I’ll jump on it.

If I’m planning to be somewhere without Internet. Hypothetically, I suppose it’s possible that I might want to read a book later in the day when I’m somewhere where they don’t have the wi-fi available for me to make the purchase. In that case, I might purchase the book in advance – but not weeks ahead of time!

Of Course This Is All Arbitrary

This is what I’m going to be doing. It may or may not work well for you. But the point here is that I’m trying to be aware of my digital habits, how I purchase things, and the amount of money, time, and attention I’m spending.

And the awareness is the goal – the money savings is going to be a side benefit.

What about you? Are you an avid reader? Any plans to re-work some of your reading workflows in 2014? Let me know in the comments!