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Comment by she11c0de | Hacker News Reader

I don't have ADHD but often find it hard to finish books too. I honestly think that there's a lot of books that are simply not worth reading. Reading a book is quite a commitment (may take up to a month for me). I often lose interest once I realize that whole book is a single idea that could be summed up in a blog post but stretched to fit 300 pages.

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“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” -- Francis Bacon

Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book provides a decent framework for dealing with the variety of books out there. There are also tools like Polar[1] that provide an easy way to do incremental reading[2] which may help when attacking a book piece by relevant piece.

[1] https://getpolarized.io/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Some of those "low density" books are actually about changing your emotional responses or embedding an idea though. Sure you can distill the entire book down to a couple of pages and get the core idea, but your lizard brain isn't going to actually absorb the idea and put it into practice in your life. A lot of the repetition in self-help books in particular is about reinforcing the idea in multiple different contexts and building a proper representation of different behaviour in the reader's mind.

Exactly. Most books are bloated. No one would publish a 20 pages book, if something is going on a book format it needs to hit a certain size.

Yes. There are a lot of books, say "business" books, that properly fleshed out with examples and context are longer than any magazine is going to publish. (Lots of the oft-quoted concepts like Crossing the Chasm fit into this category.) But they could easily fit in something like 20 to 75 pages. However, publishing economics--which still broadly apply--dictate something like a 250-300 page work.

With my last book, I expanded on a couple areas in a new edition and I feel better about the overall information density. But in the original, I definitely felt I was padding here and there to hit a page target.

That's actually the basis of... I forget the name... There's a new-ish product doing the rounds on YouTube sponsorships. Basically, they distill every book into its core ideas, and present them as a 15-minute chunk.

I like the idea, not because I dislike reading, but because it's handy to have an "idea map" of a book. The ToC is ostensibly that, but it's hard to figure out what their points are from the titles alone.

Wish I could remember what the company was called, but whatever. Haven't used them myself, but it struck me as a neat concept.

I think you mean https://www.blinkist.com/. I used it for a year, it's great for those low-density books. But really I'd like to read books, only the ones that are really interesting and valuable. My problem is that I don't want to spend money on ones that I then find are not worth the time. Perhaps someone can recommend a good subscription service with decent selection? How does scribd selection compare to amazon?

The local public library has excellent pricing.

Sounds like Blinkist is the service for you :)

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