In recent conversations with my friend Warren, he recommended that I vary my reading materials. This is something hard to do for most people. When you find a comfortable niche, you tend to read similar material and not branch out. Enjoyable books can be very difficult to find. The Amazon Kindle sample feature can help elevate this issue, the sample feature sends a short preview of the book to your Kindle for free. You get a taste of what the book is about and the writing style used. If you didn’t like the sample just delete it, if you did buy the full book. In addition, if you purchase it and like it, then you will start to get recommendations based on it. Another alternative (But still involving Amazon), is that Kindle owners can borrow books from the “Kindle library” if they have Prime.

Another way to diversify your reading is to subscribe to blogs that are outside of your interests. Despite claims by “online media” experts, RSS is still alive and used. Use the RSS feed and subscribe to the blog to keep up with it. (You can even do it with this one) Google Reader has “Recommended Feeds” and “Recommended Items” features that makes recommendations based on your subscriptions. [Word of warning, the recommendations aren’t very good]