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So Monique over on Leafmarks just reviewed a book to say something along the lines that there went two hours they'd never get back. Which sends my brain spurts off on this ramble.
How much is an hour of your time worth to you? How many hours does the average book or publication take you to read? (I'm estimating that in continual hours most books take most readers 3-8 hours to read.). What would be the retail price of the book if not free -- is the probable 99¢ to $6 book worth 3-8 hours of your time? Is it easy for you to free up 3-8 hours to read a book — is it worth blowing those hours on a bad book?
"According to a speed-reading test sponsored by Staples…here are the typical speeds at which humans read…:
Third-grade students = 150 words per minute (wpm)
Eight grade students = 250
Average college student = 450
Average “high level exec” = 575
Average college professor = 675
Speed readers = 1,500
World speed reading champion = 4,700"
and
"assume each book contains 100,000 words (a reasonable estimate), and the goal is to read one book a month. At 300 wpm, that comes to another 11 minutes a day. "
"Start with newspapers and blogs. Say you read 20 articles a day, each an average 500 words long. (Newspaper stories tend to run longer, blog posts shorter.) At 300 words per minute (the average-adult speed), you’ll spend 33 minutes a day, including weekends, on that part of your regimen."
How many hours do you put in fulfilling the agreement (even if just "free for honest review") made to get the free book behind the hours spent reading?
Why did it take me so many years before I could bring myself to DNF books? (Okay, so a lot of that was pre-internet travels with few bookstores/libraries and earlier budgets where didn't always have enough books.). Do you DNF books?
How much harm to emotional state or mood does a bad read do? Do you feel taken advantage of when a book turned out to actually be completely misleading based on description or an outright bad one (by which I mean defective in the sense of not ready for publication versus just not to your personal tastes)?
(Never-mind how many free books are now available or the "quality" of time spent where maybe that hour could have been better spent on a better read from an ever increasing TBR pile.).
