I read the same way I drove. Hands busy, ears free.
When artificial intelligence is cheap, organic intelligence becomes expensive.
Think about what's happening to the price of a competent sounding paragraph. It's going to zero. Anybody can produce one, instantly, about anything, and a great deal of what you read from now on was produced exactly that way.
So what goes up? The thing that can't be generated. A person who has actually read, actually thought, and can tell an argument from a nicely shaped sentence.
That person is getting rarer at the same moment the paragraphs are getting cheaper. Rare and useful is the only combination that has ever paid. Both halves matter. Rare and useless is a hobby.
Now, books, and there's a problem I'm not going to pretend isn't there. In the old days, for someone to have the audacity to write a book, that person needed to be a genuinely established person with lifelong wisdom, putting twenty or thirty years of experience, pain, thoughts and reflections into one book. An entire life of accumulation in one book.
Then about ten years ago people started writing them for publicity. It gives them a credential, so they hire a ghostwriter. And what's the criteria to become a writer today? If somebody has five fingers they can write a book. The market is full of crap and slop.
There's a second problem and it's arithmetic. A publisher can't charge twenty or thirty dollars for a hundred pages. So a book with a hundred pages of real content gets padded to four hundred to justify the price. You're buying the padding. Strip it out and most books are about ninety minutes long.
And one thing about when to take them in. You can't read a book while you're driving, or carrying a child, or steaming a shirt. You can hear one. I'm not making a claim about which way it sticks better. It's only the difference between those hours counting and those hours not counting.
I asked that room to finish a hundred books before they graduate. Before you read on, answer yes or no. Is a hundred books in six months possible for you?
If you said no, you costed it in reading hours you don't have, which is the right arithmetic for the wrong question. Count it again in the hours you're already spending with your hands busy and your ears free. The number moves, and it moves a lot.