Nobody finishes reading my books

Just like most nonfiction books, this post is a lot longer than it has to be. I think the core idea here is good, but it's pretty ironic that I wanted to stop halfway through.

When writing is good, succinct, and to the point, people will finish reading if they're interested in the material. If it's too long, fluffy, repetitive, annoying... people won't. I don't think it's a huge surprise.

Ironically, I read this article from start to finish, something that rarely happens with blog posts, which I usually abandon halfway through.

More seriously, I agree that writing short books or articles is an important skill. Writing long is easy; conveying the same amount of information concisely is much harder. It is also a sign of respect for busy readers.

I constantly find myself asking LLMs to be shorter, more direct, and more to the point, without fluff. They seem to have a tendency to generate endless streams of words.

Anyone read Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB)? I gave up halfway through, and shamefully admitted it to a really smart guy named Chris I met at a conference.

He said "duh, you aren't supposed to finish it - you should only get to the parable about book length, a couple chapters in!"

The parable explores the idea that a reader always has a piece of information you don't want them to have: the amount of remaining pages! If the bad guy dies and you still have 3/4 of the book in your right hand you can be sure it's not over... So as an author what do you do? Add a bunch of Lorem Ipsum? The reader will flip through and figure out where that starts. Splice in an unrelated story? The reader can still find the boundary. So you have to continue the story, but have nothing important happen (e.g., 'the next day Harry Potter ate some toast and watched Friends'). Chris was arguing that GEB talked about doing this, and then actually did it.

The author was clear that he makes his point early on and then just explains it many different ways, so maybe I believe Chris... Or maybe Chris and I are just happy to rationalize our laziness however we can :P

Fantastic article, I particularly liked the fist 15 percent of it.

One thing that I recall reading (but can't find now) is that people are statistically significantly likely to finish books with shorter chapters. It just makes so much sense to me - I want a feeling of accomplishment as I go through the content, with clear stopping points, making it easy to keep going, and also easy to pick up again.

My favorite in this regard is Minsky's "Society of Mind" where essentially every chapter/mini-essay is one page, a form which he argued is a good fit for our mental processes.

His initial point is about critics. Critics are incentivized to review many books. So, more than ordinary readers, you would expect them to read summaries, or only parts of books.

Say less.