Category: Blog
How Many E-Books Can Fit on a Flash Drive?
I am quite the computer nerd, and have a lot of back-ups, old software, and family photos stored away on various hard drives. Over the past year of embarking on this archiving quest, I have become strangely fascinated with compression and storage efficiency, alongside cataloguing files. Given the growing popularity of e-books, what with their…
Is It Cheating to Read Shorter Books?
If you poke around online enough, then there is the potential to stumble upon debates relating to book length and what supposedly counts as a proper book. In essence, these sorts of online spats tend to centre around two key points. First, the page count where a book actually becomes a book; second, whether or…
The Best Types of Writing Careers
Most people who read on a regular basis have heavily studied, perhaps even majored, in English or their native language. Typically, many of those people want to enter a career relating to writing, books, or other publications. I want to take today’s post to highlight what I personally believe to be some of the best…
What It Takes to Make a Good Book Blog
June 2025 marked two years of me operating and writing for The Steady Read. These past twenty-four months have seen lots of experimentation with this website and its layout, alongside some changes in my writing style, tone, and overall approach to the content published here. Despite the slow start, teething pains, and almost non-existent readership…
Dear Readers, Skimming Is Okay
As someone who runs a book-focused website, the question of whether skimming (also known as skim reading) is okay has lingered in the back of my mind since I started writing reviews for The Steady Read. If you want the short answer, then just know how, when, and why you read are entirely up to…
What Holds Back Aspiring Authors?
Many of us readers, even if not entirely serious about our aspirations or literary future, have probably considered the idea of writing a book, and many of us have tried or started the process. I would estimate that thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands, of non-published people sit down every year and being working…
Why You Should Review Books
Reviewing is a strange phenomenon. Tens of thousands of people, often individuals who have never created anything like the works they are reviewing, sitting around and praising or degrading a work based on particular facets and personal preference. Despite how uninformed or mind-numbing some reviews (and reviewers) can be, I want to take the next…
AI Has Started to Hurt Books
The era of the AI-generated book is upon us, and it is rather ugly. Fortunately, these immensely subpar works are still easy to spot, and are highly unlikely to ever be printed by reputable publishers, such as Faber & Faber, Penguin, or Vintage. But, with the future of entirely human-written books being gradually placed further…
How Many Books Can One Tree Make? (Including Recycling)
This question dawned on me one night when thinking about deforestation, and I felt compelled to write this quick post guestimating an answer. If you’re at least a backseat advocate for the environment, then I think you should care about how many works can be printed from the metaphorical sacrifice of a single tree. After…
The Worst Ways to Mark Your Page
Full disclosure: it is April Fool’s Day and I wanted to have a bit of fun, so this is a riff of my post about miscellaneous things you can use as a bookmark. Please—and I really mean please—do not take any of this as serious advice, or think that I am a complete imbecile. This…
