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I've recently been shown a lot of ads for a service called "blinkist" where the idea is to provide short summaries of non-fiction books and I think your comment captures why that is a very bad idea. Reading and capturing an idea takes time; it can't be properly substituted by a few minutes of "listening to crucial insights from leading thinkers while you’re on the go."

Their business model is in a way the complete opposite of the ideas in the article (although there is admittedly a difference between fiction and non-fiction books):

They show pictures of very busy business people that can't fit a book into their tight schedule; one of their ads said something along the lines of "80% of successful managers read at least 20 books per year" (which is probably just completely mixing up correlation and causation).

I don't think fiction can be shrunk down, but I think lots of non-fiction books can.

I'm thinking specifically of some books that I've read in the past couple of years that include:

  * Deep Work
  * Influence
  * Thinking Fast and Slow
  * Predictably Irrational
  * Getting Things Done
  * How to Win Friends and Influence People

I think all of these books suffer from the common pattern of present an idea then a bunch of examples that demonstrate the idea. I don't think you lose anything by ditching the examples. The core ideas are usually well stated and don't need clarification or demonstration.

That depends on how easy it's for you to learn and internalise a new idea.

You can understand the basic premise of these books by just reading the summary, but you need a lot of reinforcement to internalise the idea and want to execute on it. That's just how learning works.

I believe Amazon found people tend to leave a non fiction book 100 pages from the end, so commissioned books 100 pages shorter than usual. A lot of it is about the books looking good and justifying its own price on the bookstore shelf.

It is nice when the spline is wide enough to have the title of the book on it in a decently big font. Probably a 3/4 inch book would working in most cases. I think many books are padded to reach a certain thickness. For non-fiction the publishers should just use thicker pages or put a bunch of blank pages at the back. Or just print the whole book over again.

I agree completely about non-fiction books.

There are certainly some fiction books that could use some shrinking down (For Exhibit A: Crossroads of Twilight -- book 10 of the Wheel of Time)

I’m surprised you made it that far! I stopped reading after (I think it was) book 4 when I realized it could be summarized as “the company travels a few miles down a river for 800 pages”.

Now that you mention it, when I was reading Snow Crash I started skipping all the parts about ancient Sumerian language. All that he needed to do was establish that it worked as some kind of low-level system of the brain that could be tinkered with. Instead it felt like he spent 4 months researching ancient Sumer and by God he was going to not let that work go to waste.

Agreed in principle, and clearly there's no binary rule as every book will have its own level of "padding" / laboring the point, but I think the (O)OPs comment about "internalizing" is interesting, and personally I don't think a "tl;dr" of the books above wouldn't have had the same effect on me.

I agree that there's no binary rule. I read Sapiens and while it was a very long book, I don't think it could have been shorter.

BTW, laboring the point is precisely the phrase I was looking for but couldn't recall.

What I find about general-interest nonfiction is not that it's longer than it needs to be to make its point, but that its point is often shallow or even wrong. Take Freakonomics. I thought it was a great read, but on reflection I think "there's a hidden economic reason for everything" is not a particularly useful observation. Indeed, it might be better stated that "there's no realm of human behavior that economists won't study." Or to take an older example, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. Published in 1999. Or The Great Depression of 1990, published in 1985. Or consider pretty much any book of diet advice. If it was published more than 15 years ago, it's very unlikely to agree with our current understanding of healthy diet. If it was published less than 15 years ago, we haven't debunked it yet.

I wonder whether blinkist agrees with, but does it anyway because people want it.

Some people will want something just because you're trying to sell it to them though.

I tried Blinkist and have been disappointed. I tried a few of the daily freebies to see if it would educate and engage me to a degree that snack sized blog posts did not. Mostly it failed, and I still came away with that empty feeling of reading a short blog post.

That said, I struggle to find business books that are actually meaty enough to warrant reading more than the first chapter, as many of them seem to just have filler content (like many blog posts coincidentally). I'd love to find some way of identifying quality books in this genre.

Meanwhile, I try to carve out time for reading fiction because spending my day between HN, Reddit, random blog posts, etc. for my "news and info" can't be healthy for me, and I absolutely feel it in my attention span when trying to read an actual book.

I'd say it's mostly that our brain has ~resistance (ideas are complex network, and we all have our own). Taking time ensure deep massaging. Also being relaxed and not hurried is probably a more favorable state of mind to "massage". It also allows for daydreaming about related ideas and inspirations that the text causes. Pleasure breeds memory and understanding.

I can think of one non-fiction book in particular that benefits hugely from being read as a summary[0]. The E-Myth contains some great information, but the storytelling style it is written in is absolutely excruciating.

[0] https://sivers.org/book/EMythRevisited (I liked this summary - I found the link a few weeks ago on here. Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sivers)

Where non-fiction books have a bad signal-to-noise ratio but still provide interesting insights begetting a summary, the best service can be done by a new motivated writer: trying to merely summarize a book squashes the "space" in which insight can deeply take place, as opposed to digesting the message and crafting a new message, an amalgam of ideas from another and another almost harmless business book, into something new, more dense and hopefully superseding. It's a natural evolution of the world's knowledge and books perfectly encapsulate the writer and reader's span and frame of mind leading to good analytical learning.

Most non-fiction books that I've started and quit reading before 25% was because they felt like the content that could fit in a blog post had been stretched to over 300 pages.

I've found that summaries can give you quite a good idea of what the book is about in most cases. I read the full book if the summary interests me.

> I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought.

Spot on and cue page turns! Fan open a book and read horizontally. Have intermediate stops between chunks of text on two well-formatted pages and then transition to next. A second to soak in the content in between with time and space makes for a huge difference!

Scrolling animation can never achieve or serve this sort of efficiency!

I recently wrote an essay on some of the underlying psychophysics and varying outcomes of user interfaces (UX/UI) and how pagination with page turns (codex) helps in reading and forming memories[1].

[1] https://bubblin.io/concerns

I think you're confused about the meanings of the terms horizontal and vertical reading. The linked piece does not use the term "vertical reading" to mean reading on a vertically scrolling screen vs. reading printed pages in a book. Rather, the author uses "vertical reading" to mean deep reading as compared to shallow/broad reading:

> Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading, skimming along the surface.

Yes, it means the same thing: skimming vs. soaking in with "duration state" in between. Unless one set of labels appear more valuable to you than the other…

This is completely orthogonal to scrolling vs pages, however.

Horizontal is typically orthogonal to vertical.

I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.

> I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.

You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.

I don't get romanticism around books and I can't help but eye roll when someone a) gushes about reading or b) waxes poetic about the past.

We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds. When I want to learn, the most efficient path is usually not through a single author. Why should it be? Why is it bad if we predominantly piece together information through multimedia? I don't get this article or the "reading club" mentality at all. Though I often hear it come out at parties as virtue signal.

You need to read some literature. Information is not knowledge or understanding.

Funny you say that, I was an English major for a brief while in college. I switched to a creative writing minor before the end of my first year.

For whatever it was my English professors had, it was my creative writing professors with real acclaim and ability.

> You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.

True in a literal sense, but irrelevant.

In order to change the pace a video, you need to actively interact with the video player; it's hard or impossible to get into a state of flow[1] if you need to constantly press buttons to pause, skip or replay parts of the video, change its speed, or find the specific second you want to analyze.

This affects the depth of reasoning about the concepts you're getting from the media. In a written text, you can naturally pause and reflect upon a paragraph, or re-read recent paragraphs only by moving the eyes up, slowing down at particularly difficult or interesting sections.

This state of mind of "intense mental concentration" when reading is a good basis for learning and reflection, and can be combined a more powerful range of options when reading; with video you can also get into that state, but then the video moves forward uniformly, and the pace at which you're confronted with the concepts is defined by the media, not your mental processes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Yes, consuming audio and video for information has improved in recent years. It is now practical to change the playback speed and return to a particular point using transcripts. While these tools are not universally available, they are certainly gaining traction for educational content. On the other hand, it is not quite the same as reading a text for the reasons described by TuringTest.

> We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds.

While I have some reservations about digital texts, I agree that the situation is far better than it was 30 years ago. I fear that many people have forgotten how long it used to take to find information in the past, never mind obtain it, never mind the financial cost.

As for those reservations, they are mostly the product of the digital environment that we have created and accepted. They have very little to do with access to access to or the nature of books. The article hinted at this when it mentioned greed. Common dedicated e-readers are designed to sell books as much as designed to read books. Most websites are designed to deliver advertising as much as delivering content. General purpose devices present a continuous stream of distractions that leave us victim to our own vices. It does not have to be that way, but it takes a proactive approach for it to be otherwise.

We would be better served if we acknowledged the shortcomings of electronic texts (as well as audio and video delivery) then took the initiative to address them.

Maybe you just represent (echo) the hubris of the new century? The past doesn't need any more romanticising or contemporary poetry than it needs new Mozarts, Shakespeares, Balzacs and Einsteins, whereas the twenty-first century is in dire search of true genius, for all the torrent of information being churned and churned. The ratio of intelligent study decays as the numbers of daily YouTube views sharply rise. It astounds me that people really believe progress is being made on the habits of deep intellectual work with new gadgets.

I agree with this. I've found that for myself, reading is much more effective because everything has to go through my inner monologue first, whereas videos circumvent that.

My inner monologue is where I really begin to understand / remember / question concepts.

That's also why I like writing difficult concepts down, because then I will be forced to put it through my inner monologue once more.

What I want out of books is to be able to work them into a sequential feed workflow. I don't think it's likely to happen without hacks in my lifetime due to DRM.

But it would be great to get chapters of books woven in between long and short form textual content whose sources are personally curated. If someone thinks they can either work out a deal with Amazon or otherwise get around the DRM issue in a commercial product, drop me a line, I'd love to build V1.

Think about it, all text content, sliced and diced for maximum consumability. It just might make feed readers sexy again.

I have no idea what anything you wrote means. Can you explain in everyday language, assuming I'm your grandma?

Why do you want to slice chapters from separate books together and insert 'textual content' inbetween them?

Books, sliced by chapter, in an RSS feed reader.

So I can read, say, a NYT article, then chapter one of a book, then maybe a blog post, then chapter one of a different book, then a long-form article, then chapter two of the first book.

you are missing the point of reading anything long form

Are you saying you never put a book down and pick it back up later?

Yeah you sound incredibly ADHD.

If I was does that mean it wouldn't be worth building an app to help?

I see what he's getting at.

Last night I watched an episode of True Detectives. Tonight I'll look for a hockey game on TV. Tomorrow I might watch some Game of Thrones. I also have a couple episodes of Better Call Saul on my DVR. I watch (and read) the thing that appeals to me at the time I want it.

Another benefit would be the same UX for all text content consumption.

If that's how we're looking at it, wouldn't that be the same essential idea as leaving a bookmark and juggling a few books at once?

Of course, but if you are lost in a good book, you don't notice when one chapter ends and another beings. You are lost for hours, and don't think about changing to some other article or paper.

Sure. And with the Netflix model you can binge on episode after episode. There are a lot of similarities.

I really like this idea and it overlaps slightly with my side project. I'd love to give it a try even if it's just with DRM free content initially.

Sadly, it doesn't even slightly interest me if I can't insert anything I have on my pile into the feed. It's an all-or-nothing thing. When I get interested enough, I'll probably do something really hacky.

The great Roman emporer, Marcus Aurelius, says the following in the beginning of his book, Meditations:

To read attentively—not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”

"heh, marcus, we meet again"

-- everybody since

These days I take reading not as a data input but as a personal game. Authors ideas are mostly a way to let me have my own little intellectual creative game. It avoid reading from authority, passive absorption, weakening of thinking.

I completely agree re: non-fiction. This is why I started creating 15 minute shorts that summarise the key concepts for busy, time-conscious readers for less.

https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/15-minute-shorts

I also think there is a lot of therapeutic power embedded in literature (fiction and nonfiction) and I've created some 15 minute literary guides too for lots of different issues and interests: https://www.booktherapy.io/collections/literary-guides

I found this experience to be very true while reading Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It was easy to just look at the table of contents and immediately know all the steps - but only by reading the whole chapter could I actually internalize how to put each tenet into practice and what it looked like in reality.

How do you learn from a book, genuinely?

Do you sit down and try to read and understand as much as you can? Or do you just read during your downtime?

I think you should mention that you are talking about non novel non fiction stuff, like self improving and technical books, which is an entirely different world of reading (as in more learning than pleasure), at least that's what I understood from you.