With instant messages and tweets, many of us don’t take much time to read each day. What we read is for entertainment in bits and pieces, or to understand a procedure at work or home. Students end up reading more for their classes (if cliff notes count). Few read for pleasure.

Even if you have a few minutes while waiting for a meeting, you probably don’t drag a book or newspaper along to read. More likely these days, you have an iPhone or smartphone in your pocket. But where do you get this digital content on the cheap?

There are free services such as bookaday that send a chapter a day from books of different genres. They take about five minutes to read. After you complete the daily read, you can discard it from your email inbox or save it for the next visit to the library. There is no additional weight to lug around.

Some services provide access to full books online. A laptop with a wifi connection and you have a book to read.  The Gutenberg project takes older books that have expired copyright and makes the full text available for download. You can save them in a number of formats including plain text and html webpage. Have you read 20,000 leagues under the sea lately?

Reading is important to keep up your knowledge. Although we hope we learn from the television shows that we watch, a book contains a wealth of knowledge. From academic topics to stories that contain language structures, a book is more than just a book.

If you enjoy a book so much, you can buy the digitial version or the paper copy for the book collection.

Turn off that cellphone and television and read a little. Unless you are reading a book on your cellphone or television. In that case, keep on reading.