NOW WE KNOW how President Bush reads so many books. It’s a “discipline deal,” the president says. “I don’t watch TV,” he says. And he reads every morning while doing an hour of exercise and on the many long flights aboard Air Force One.

For someone with a full-time job as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief, the number of books he’s read is quite amazing: 95 in 2006, 51 in 2007, 40 by Christmas last year. Yet he lost each year in competition with his friend and political adviser Karl Rove, who revealed their book reading rivalry in the Wall Street Journal. Recently Bush has begun using a Kindle wireless reading device.