Quote Originally Posted by grafrich View Post
When I see verbs like почитать vs прочитать I know I'm looking at something which needs to be considered as a special case; a lot of verbs have one imperfective form and a few perfectives, (and почитать has another meaning and it's own perfective too?)
It's already perfective it just means a different thing

почитать (per.) - to spend time reading
прочитать (per.) to read the whole piece of text

BTW, по+ base verb has a very wide and common usage in the meaning of "spend time doing something"

A few examples:

поговорить
погулять
поработать
побегать and etc, etc.