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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

Excerpt:

"After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato, which Wilson-Lee dubbed the “miracle of compression”."

Amazing.

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I'm a writer, translator, and literary promoter. Sometimes I think I've never done anything more difficult than reading long works of literature and summarizing them faithfully in one or two paragraphs. It's absolutely brutal mental and compositional work.

What's your opinion about services which provides summary for the books, such as blinkist?

Do you think those services are an asset or that it affects the book negatively? Do you think, if the original author wrote the summary; it would make a difference?

I have built news aggregators apps which uses summary from original description of author & also built bots which summarizes content; I'm conflicted between the value of a summary provided by the author /reader. I know that a book cannot be compared with a news article.

From what I learned from listening to an interview with a Blinkist founder Holger Seim on the Factory Berlin Facebook page, they employ experts in the fields that the books are about to summarize them. So while this is not an author-provided summary, it is (seemingly) closer than a mere reader summary.

Yes, they have mentioned that in their FAQ as well. But still, even though they're professional; they would still be a reader.

Edit:Typo

I feel a work of art is its entirety. Could you summarize Beethoven's 3rd in a few chords? Maybe, but think of the context you're missing out on. A novel exists as it is and it's more than plot. It's style and concept and form and feeling and sometimes you have to read the whole thing before you realize you got something of worth out of it. Sometimes you don't. But a summary can't possibly tell you this.

Being paid to just read a book and no expectation other than to write a summary. Awesome!

Well, it is not that simple. You no longer have the liberty to stop reading if you find it boring. You have to provide a summary, even if you don't understand or if the book is not deserving. In other words, what you once loved becomes work. Net loss - one hobby you might have truly loved.

The way you describe it reminds me of how I've heard video game QA testing described by friends who did it briefly. At first it sounds like you get paid to play games, but in practice it's not your favorite type, sometimes you have to do repetitive actions to try to recreate a bug, etc.

I had a roommate that reviewed porn. At our age it sounded like the best job ever, but he showed us his review sheets. He had to document the timestamp of every lick, rub, fart, moan, squirt, insertion, scene change, et al. He absolutely hated it.

I did paid beer testing for market research once. It wasn’t fun! Had to take sips of dozens of out of date beers, all the same brand and fill in long forms about each one tasted.

I wish there were a Wikipedia-like alternative for Blinkist.

I've had an idea rolling around in my head for a while now - a mix of wikipedia, spotify, and blinkist. The idea would be book summaries, in written and audio form, for both entire books and chapter-by-chapter. They could be submitted by anyone, and ranked/upvoted in terms of accuracy and quality. Ad/subscription revenue would be shared with content creators.

Interesting, with a few different levels of detail, readers could get into a book in a "progressive refinement" sort of way. You could stop after your desired level of detail is reached, rather than stopping after chapter 3 because it got boring.

Yes definitely. Or choose particular chapters that you think would be relevant for you.

I wonder how far away we are for this being automated? I'm sure it could be done now, but accuracy, especially for more dense and difficult books, would be lacking.

I'd imagine there are some cases that would be fairly difficult for automation. Take a philosophy book, for example. I have no idea how automation would provide an overview of what happens in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Some written material requires going beyond the text and explaining the ideas themselves.

This is why I am so grateful for living now. Now content extraction is done by algorithms and automation. Speeds up the process.

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