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Comment by chki | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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 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)

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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 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.

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