It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, and easily read 200-400 books a year.
Here's a post I wrote on effective non-fiction reading techniques, for more info on the approach: http://personalmba.com/10-days-to-faster-reading/
-- 10-20 minutes per book? -- 20 to 30 books in a few hours.
I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins.
I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.
I could see things getting to the point to where you could have the option to generate an executive summary from any popular book that tries to hit the main points. Then you drill down as you want more information. Books could function almost like mini-wikis at that point but with a narrative or order that you use to drive through it.
2. buy a copy of Neuromancer
3. search for the part where Case tells his Ono-Sendai to "sift this shit. 2 minute precis"
4. Be amazed once again that a guy with a typewriter predicted what you're doing.
Serendipity! I was thinking the same thing -- though I was thinking more along the lines of Quora posts.
This is a feature I have posted about and asked for on Reddit actually; the ability to tag information to topic and quality etc.
This would really apply to quora best though, as the information is already sorted in one dimenstion: quora topics.
I'd like to be able to assemble and curate information from sources like quora and get them into a more of a how-to; infact I posted a question along these lines on quora, with little response.
(http://www.quora.com/Would-Quora-users-like-an-entrepreneurs...)
However - I predict that this will be a golden goose of social search. A question is asked within a particular topic, experts respond - then the best answers to the most popular questions within a topic, and tagged by the audience, are assembled into cliff-notes of information on that topic.
Fortunately, this is what nearly all "business" books are. They repeat that two pages of content over and over. If you spend 20 minutes skimming, chances are you will hit the actual content at least once.
Another interesting point is that most business books, if they cite references, usually only cite a few. Often times one can look up the paper(s) it references and get the actual content in a much more, ah, compact form, without most of the sales.
Of course, /actually reading/ business books rather than skimming them, I think, is a reasonable way to figure out how to talk to and even to sell to business people. I mean, that's what the book is doing, right? even if the actual "content" of the book is complete BS, if the book is a popular one, it's obviously good at selling to business people, and you can learn by example.
http://artofmanliness.com/2009/10/18/how-to-speed-read-like-...
Maybe business books are just different than technical/science oriented ones.
10-20 minutes won't cut it for deep technical material, particularly if the book is designed to teach via working through examples. If you're reading a workbook, then take the time to work through the examples. Choose your workbooks carefully, since they require a more significant time investment.
Most non-fiction books, however, are written around a few simple, straightforward concepts - you can identify them in a few minutes. A few more minutes identifying examples, relationships to other concepts, and counter-examples / edge cases, and you've extracted 90% of the value of the text.
Almost every non-fiction book fits this model. It pays to tailor your reading approach to what you're reading.
As to value - in general, most business books are marginally valuable in isolation. Once you read many of them, however, very useful patterns begin to emerge. Recognizing and using those patterns provides the value.
I'm at the point where I can sometimes skim through arXiv papers and understand the gist.
(Does it work the same for books with code in them? Legit coders can skim and understand?)
Since they're not actually written in PHP, I've got to switch to a new language. ObjectiveC for iPhone, Android-Java, or any number of cross platform languages to pick up a third party framework.
On top of that - there's the issues of structure and stuff.
For learning a new language, there's no way to skim.
HOWEVER for something like an A* pathfinding algorythm (an artificial intelligence method of finding the most efficient path from A to Anywhere) - you can get the "Gist" by skimming a paper. I understand what A* is and how it does it ... but if I want to replicate it I still have to go over it line-by-line if I want to get it right though.
So, I think the short answer is "NO" coders can't skim stuff and get the job done right.
Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.