How To Be A Smart Blogger And Save Money On Books – Use A Kindle

Last month, I bought a kindle.  Although my only desire at the time was to have a portable library to carry with me on planes, trains, and (the passenger seat of) automobiles, I soon discovered that my Kindle gives me access to hundreds of free books.  Far from being a mere convenience, the availability of so many free books means that, for the price of a Kindle, anyone can become the smartest blogger in the room, with money to spare.

Allow me to elaborate:

1.    Smartest Blogger

There’s an old cliché in the health and fitness world that says “you are what you eat.”  The same principle also applies in the world of written communication—only here we might say that you are what you read.  Among the most useful forms of written communication these days is the blog—a cost effective vehicle for marketing yourself, your business, and even your stream of consciousness to the entire world.  Successful blogs can also be a source of advertising revenue. Because your agility as a blogger depends on the quality of what you read, the safest way to become a smart blogger is to read great books by great authors.

Although the greatness of a book or author might depend on personal taste, you can safely assume that if a book is still being read decades or even centuries after it was written, it is a great read.  By this measure, you can enjoy literature from diverse genres and historical periods.

2.  Free Books (And Money To Spare)

Typically, great books by great authors cost money.  And even if the cost of physical books is not an impediment to you, there are back-end costs associated with owning them.  Bookshelves cost money, occupy space, and collect dust.  If you move into a new home or apartment, the bulky weight of your books can add to your moving fees.  The point here is not to suggest that anyone should completely abandon physical books; on the contrary, the point is that if you are serious about reading literary classics, you can read and store loads of them for free on a Kindle.

Ancient classics like the lliad, by Homer, start for about 5 dollars on Amazon.ca.  Through the Project Gutenberg website—a clearinghouse of free books—you can download the Iliad onto your Kindle for free.  War and Peace by Tolstoy? It starts at around 10 bucks on Amazon.ca but can be downloaded for free onto your Kindle.  If you plow through 20 great books in the course of a year—or even just skim through them—you can either spend hundreds of dollars on purchasing, storing, and moving physical copies of the books, or you could download them onto your Kindle for free.

With all the money you save by downloading literary classics onto your Kindle, imagine all the extra gifts you can buy for loved ones during the holiday season.