How I manage to read a book per week

Year after year, every time Bill Gates published his list of favorite books, I’m feeling a certain envy, not only of his bank account but also because of his reading ability (he reads about 50 books a year)

Fascinated by the ability of this kind of people to read so many books in such a short time, I barely read a couple a year, I became interested in techniques of speed reading, but after a while testing them I realized that I did not enjoy reading like this , sometimes it generated me some stress and sometimes I lost the focus very easily, besides my sight getting tired faster than with normal reading.
I also tried summary applications like Blinklist, but they try to synthesize so much that the context is completely lost, you can not really summarize a book of 300 pages in 10 pages without losing part of the essence of the book, although I think they are really interesting to review concepts of books that you have already read.

One day trying a pdf reader for Android, I discovered that it incorporated an option that allowed reading the text using Google’s text to speech engine and after trying it with different texts I saw that it had improved a lot compared to past versions where the voice was too much robotized and without intonations, so I tried several applications that used that engine to read some articles until I found Reedy. There are several text2speech apps, but Reedy audio settings are really easy to manage, it also allows you to send to it any web content and to open several formats of ebooks. The results were satisfactory and every time I read more web articles and news with this system on the way to the office.
After a while testing and adapting the settings (type of voice, speed, tone) everything was ready to test the reading of books with this system.

I started my experiment with a list of 5 books as main goal, some of https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Best-Books-2017 and the results were amazing, just listening them during my way to work and when I was running I finished the first book in less than 2 weeks, little by little I was increasing the speed of reading up to 300% without hardly noticing it and in less than two months I had read the 5 books from the list.

Although there are other alternatives to this method like listen audiobooks, I think these are less versatile because they do not allow you to listen web articles or news, neither you have the option to read some parts normally and listen others.) Moreover, most of its content is only in English whereas google’s text2speech engine supports multiple languages ​​(I read a lot in Spanish)

Here is the list of books that I have read in the first 3 months of this year:

As downside I would say that at the beginning it is a bit strange, when there are annotations or figures you have to look at your phone (although the app warns you that there is an image in the content), so I usually read the parts of books showing many graphics and relevant figures instead of listen them.

But the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages:

• Free time: Reading like this (doing sports, walking, etc.) I do not spend part of my free time in reading, so I have that time to do other things.
• Multitasking: You can do other activities at the same time because it allows you to read anywhere while you move (house chores, shopping, jogging, walking, bike, plane, subway),
• You do not need light: (you can read in the dark without disturbing anyone),
• Read faster: At least in my case the increase in reading speed has been remarkable.
• Restful view (I already spend too many hours a day looking at a screen)
• Not only books: You can read any type of text in digital format, such as a web article, news, etc.
• Hybrid: Although I’m listening books almost all the time, sometimes I combine it with normal reading and I do not really know what part of the book I’ve listened or what part I’ve read so the compression capacity is similar to the traditional reading

Since I wrote the draft of this article in early April until its publication today I have 3 more books read plus two in process, the idea is to continue testing it throughout the year and see if it really works, so at the end of the year I will publish an update with the results.

7 Jan 2019 Update: Here is the list of books that I finally read in 2018: