I maintain a constant stack of between five and a dozen library books on the floor next to my bed.  The local library lets me place up to fifteen books on hold at a time, and at any given moment I am probably using up my entire quota.  Clearly, I have far too many books on hand to read in a reasonable amount of time, and yet I rarely return a book to the library until I have gleaned every useful bit of knowledge from it.  I have never spent any serious time studying speedreading techniques; in fact, my reading speed is only slightly above average.  I am able to keep up with such a large supply of literature because only very rarely will I actually read any work of nonfiction.  Instead, I skim, skip, and scan.

Skimming should be a familiar process; by skimming I mean running your eyes quickly through the text, picking up only enough words to get the gist of a piece of writing.  Skimming lets you search quickly for the parts of a book that are most useful, which you can then read at a more normal pace (and, if they are useful enough, reread as many times as you like).  Never spend valuable time reading things that you already know or have no interest in—instead, skim for the good stuff.

Better yet, bypass the fluff altogether—apply the 80/20 principle and skip the parts that you just don’t need.  I am writing this while waiting at a gate at the Philadelphia airport.  During my flight here from Atlanta I worked my way through the first 102 pages of Barry Farber’s How to Learn Any Language (review coming soon).  I skimmed and skipped over 3/4 of the introduction.  One chapter described a very useful technique for remembering vocabulary, but spent over a dozen pages offering a variety of examples of its use.  I read the first three examples and skipped the rest.  Remember: any time spent reading information that you don’t need, won’t use, or already know is time wasted.  Be ruthless.

Finally, you will often find that some parts of a book are so useful that you simply have to keep them available as reference material (for me, charts, tutorials, and bibliographies often fall into this category).  If you enjoy the material enough and want to give back to the author, you can buy a copy of the book.  If you’re like me, however, you don’t have the access to the large trust fund that you would need to do this as often as you would like to, so instead you’ll need to resort to scanning the pages that you want to keep (If you don’t have access to a flatbed scanner, you can use the photocopier at your local library).  Among the items that I’ve added to my digital archives are workout charts from The New Rules of Lifting, the epilogue of Your Money or Your Life, a chapter on knife sharpening from An Edge in the Kitchen, a packing checklist from The Traveler’s Toolkit, and many others.

Taken together, skimming, skipping, and scanning will enable you to quickly extract the most useful parts of the books that you read and keep those parts indefinitely.  Together with a decent method of choosing reading material and a strong notetaking system, these techniques will turn you into a freakish learning machine in no time!