Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Are the books gaining popularity again? What are your thoughts?
Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. A lot of the ideas presented in those books could be adequately presented in a 10th of the number of pages.
A huge time-saver has been reading the article versions of stuff that has been turned into a book. You get the same points, but in minutes instead of hours.
This applies to many non-fiction best-sellers in the self-help and pop science categories, but is very unfair as a generalization about non-fiction. (And bloat is not restricted to non-fiction, either: do we really need 10,000 pages of Wheel of Time or Stormlight Archive?).
I'm looking at my bookshelves now and see great books like Ryan's "A Bridge Too Far," Peltzold's "Code", Hodges' "The Enigma," Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers," Churchill's "Marlborough." None of these feel "bloated" or "padded" (okay maybe "Marlborough" is a little bloated). None of them were written to convey a handful of ideas to make you look smart at a cocktail party. Surely the information in these books could be condensed, but that condensed form wouldn't produce the same experience.
I'm a recent fan and discovered I enjoy the worlds. I find them engrossing. imo Sanderson could cut down 10-20% (Rhythm of War in particular suffered from length). But, I did appreciate his own defense of length in the genre.
https://www.tor.com/2014/03/04/words-of-radiance-and-the-art...
His insight seems to boil down to
1. Treat it as multiple books if you prefer. 2. "I get the chance to write what I enjoy. I understand it's not for everyone. That doesn't bother me."
I’ve started to put more of an emphasis on “active” reading (for lack of a better word) in which I take what I’m reading and think it through for myself, rather than just passively accepting it.
It is certainly slower than passively reading, but the result is that I actually understand the subject much better.
You could read a dictionary definition of the word courage and vaguely understand it. You could read a full page with examples and understand it better. But when you read Socrates’ dialogue Laches on the meaning of courage, your understanding will be far deeper. Even if you don’t agree with the arguments made, the act of thinking through all of the arguments helps you understand what your own views really are.
Obviously most books aren’t written as Socratic dialogues, but if you take the arguments and stories that are presented throughout the book and actively think on each one, your understanding and retention will really improve.
And this is not to say there aren’t bad books and that many aren’t bloated. But providing you with the opportunity to think on a topic from many different angles through the use of different examples can be invaluable.
Another book on the same topic (https://www.packtpub.com/product/get-your-hands-dirty-on-cle...) has only 156 pages and is far more useful in practice - but you'll learn less about the authors adventures in history.
Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing content.
When I see a 1000 page tome about every single feature of Photoshop, then nope. I'll google it thanks.
History is non-fiction, too. And I'd definitely rather read a book than some blog, because there will be a long thread of things that build up on each other, and I think books are just better suited for that.
So, things that require prolonged attention because of an overarching concept I'd rather read about in a book.
This culture is hugely detrimental. You simply cannot in-depth absorb knowledge about anything in minutes. This isn't how the brain works. Churning through dozens of articles and spending small amounts of time with each one will leave you with no recollection of any of it in a year. It's not a serious way to learn.
Unless we're talking about promotional campaign books or something of similarly low quality, non-fiction books elaborate on things at length for a reason. Details, motivations and nuances matter. And you don't get that out of a Sparknotes summary. You will not really get what an author wants to say without spending time with his or her work. It takes people years to truly grok and write down what they want to teach, you're not going to learn it in an hour.
First, there's entertaining/pop non-fiction, like, say, Malcom Gladwell's stuff, which has a lot of fluff but at least you enjoy the reading.
There are history books and memoirs that are just interesting - for example I've recently went through the entire series of Churchill's WWII memoirs, they're mostly awesome, though I did skip a couple of less interesting chapters. For these I prefer audiobooks while driving, which make it easier for me to focus.
Then there are CS books where you can pick and choose chapters and don't have to read the entire thing; they just go way deeper than blog posts, so if you want to REALLY know a subject, you better buy a book or two. I don't mean books like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer, etc which I almost never read in their entirety and can be summarized in 10% of their length, but more deep guides to things like Information Retrieval, NLP, Database Internals, etc.
This has soured me on the genre of pop-nonfiction in general, because my trust is absolutely zero at this point (it's not like Gladwell is the only confabulist there) - and if I have to cross-reference every single fact, I might as well just skip to the bibliography section. If there is one.
That has, in fact, become my criterion for most non-fiction I buy directly (without reference/recommendation) - does it have a bibliography section. I recommend it, because at the very least it gives you a great shopping list for round two on the subject :)
The last non-fiction books on the other hand were huge disappointments. Even Daniel Kahneman, to my surprise: Noise had a good idea and was well written, but could easily have been 1/4 of its size or less. I don't have either the time or patience to go through 75% fluff. It feels more and more like books are written for the less intelligent audience, with the abundance of examples and repetitions.
As for the blogs I read: AstralCodexTen, Zvi, MarginalRevolution, Noahpinion etc. They're obviously not everybody's cup of tea since it's about my tastes and preferences, but I dare anybody to say even above-average non-fiction books are better than that.
I remember reading most of the book and skipping a couple of chapters. While the results and ideas are great, I feel most of the chapter is the historical background, Ie “Tversky and I were doing this in the 60s …” It could be heavily reduced and still get the point across.
The Splendid & the Vile was the most enjoyable book of his imo.
Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today."
Thank you for reminding me of this excellent essay.
I can't imagine limiting myself to a single type of textual presentation.
Do you have any advice on how to retain blog posts better? Re-read them everyday for a few days?
However, blog posts often has more up to date information and they are, by necessity, more direct. They are good when you are closer to a master in the subject, I feel like. They are akin to research papers, but for engineers.
However, some books end up with much longer notes than the books themselves. One of my favorites was actually Aristotle's Poetics. A lot of the classic non-fiction are like that; the article versions are longer.
But what I've learned is avoid most practical books; things that tell you what to do. I think the problem is that the advice is generally weak, and the extra "fluff" is just finding support for this weak advice. An exception is the Pomodoro Technique which works perfectly fine when you don't read the book.
Instead go for the books that study the phenomenon, like The Power of Habit instead of Atomic Habits. Something like 33 Strategies of War is written as a historic book. The summaries tend to be much weaker than the book. Those are the kinds of books you should be reading.
Poetics was actually recommended by a lot of screenwriters, who basically called the rulebook. So you can also go from articles to books when the same books are emerging in multiple sources.
The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, Our Mathematical Universe are some that are better because of their book format. I'd put Hackers in that category too (along with pretty much all the books by Steven levy).
The phoenix project is a lot more entertaining as a novel too thought that kind of blurs the lines towards fiction.
You can usually tell in the first few pages if it's written in that cookie cutter "must make it to 350 pages so I'll stuff it with 200 pages of fluff" style. It is really annoying though. I love books but this drives me crazy
I'm reading more fiction books now. I want to detach the idea of "learning" from my reading habit and read just for the pleasure of it.
There's still something about good prose that connects with you unlike anything else.
One thing I like about following good blogs is seeing ideas from authors develop week to week. I think this encourages a deeper understanding of the topic and makes some books seem immediately outdated in comparison.
Is this really that rampant or different from SEO? Padding a book out with fluff has a cost. What's the cost to pad out an article with keywords or lengthen for SEO?
For example, The Secret Life of Trees or pretty much anything by Bill Bryson or Antony Beevor. The goal is not to pick up a new skill, but to enjoy a few hours with someone who knows a lot of trivia.
like what? any example?
I haven't fully sworn off blogs, but I will skim anything brought to my attention on Medium, a corporate site, or from search results. My default assumption for these is that I'm reading content marketing and not an actual blog post.
Tutorials are probably the most information dense things these days. Followed by podcasts, although the content marketers are actively trying to corrupt that medium.
I feel like this is very true for topics that are extremely shallow, like programming language frameworks.
Otherwise, I find that a good non-fiction book has no equal when it comes to transferring a nuanced mindset or base understanding from the author to the audience.
A tutorial is nice for what it is, a way to quickly become a beginner. Books at their best can give you so much context around they how and why that is very difficult to build by scouring the web for short form content.
I do agree, though, that bad books are insidious time wasters. I've had to find ways to quickly identify if I'm reading one of those, and I apply that process any time I start a big book (I also tend to search out opinions on good books from others before I ever have the book in my hands).
I'd argue that the framework in question matters a lot. If you could link me to a blog post to get me up and running on Rails, I'd ask for a link (seriously, would be interested).
For vast frameworks like that, I think a book could be very beneficial. "Getting Started" sections can focus too much on streamlined starts when (at least personally) I'd love to dive into how the ORM works for more complex joins instead of just a single "get all" query for a single table.
1) Check user reviews for complaints of repetition
2) Read the Table of Contents. If the chapter titles seem more "narrative" (e.g. The Man that Couldn't Tell a Lie..) I expect the kind of fluff I see on social media.
3) Read a chapter towards the middle or end of a book and see if it is building on prior concepts or just rehashing them and presenting new, potentially irrelevant information.
I had to take copious notes to make sense of the mass of information, to organize it in a way that my brain could take in, and to glean the facts needed for my research papers.
In some cases, I had to dispute the historian's arguments, which required even more concentration to get inside the head of a scholar who was backing up their statements with 20-30 years or more of research and learning.
That's what I think of as real writing! Then we have fiction (fantasy and science fiction have always been my preferences) that allows us to lose ourselves in a brilliantly described world created by an incredible imagination and lovingly crafted.
Modern writing... yeah, not quite as seductive, though once in a while one can find some very interesting stuff on substack or medium (or here on HN for that matter). There's always more to learn.
Funny you should say that. I can't bring myself to listen to any because of all of the filler and gimmicks.
You have to watch out for the ones who want to start a business or a cult, but it will be something like "Check out my new system of psycho-cyber-kinetics" and it's just "be kind to people." I imagine a lot of people wouldn't be into this but I love it.
If you've seen the show Severance, the for now imaginary "The You you are" would be a perfect example of this (and I'm hoping they really write it.)
It's not so much for the quality of the content, but for the...feel?
edit:
The more I think about it, I'm realizing I probably do this as an antidote to social media? Social media being "quick, not very thoughtful, hot takes, often unkind" and the above is the opposite?
It does convey an interesting idea though -- that if you knew nothing of the real world, even something written by that benevolent doofus brother-in-law would be emotionally impactful. I think I get what you mean by genuine authors.
Brett, the interviewer, seems to be very well prepared for the questions and the conversation has always a good pace with every episode mostly under 50 minutes.
I got a subscription to Blinkist this year and use these ~20min audio summaries to determine if I think it is worth slogging through the whole book for more detail. It rarely is with modern non-fiction. I read most non-fiction to absorb information and learn new ideas, not for the joy of reading - that's what fiction is for. Of course the genre of non-fiction book is usually indicative of how much it is full of blaa blaa anecdotes, etc. Blinkist is at its best when listening to self improvement for example.
I haven't gone back to blinkist to try this but I think a way to build up semantic memory with blinkist would be listening to every single title in a specific category to go really deep on that one category. At that point you're doing the equivalent of reading a full length non-fiction book anyway, so you haven't saved time, but at least you could triangulate what the core ideas / themes are through the entire category and really get the lay of the land whilst also getting the core messages deeply ingrained.
Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.
What makes such a nonfiction book different from a fiction book, which is usually just a bag of tropes?
Totally agree with you on this. Best example of this is much hyped "Atomic Habits". I appreciate this book's ideas, and have huge respect for the author.
(One trick here is to buy short/small non-fiction books.)
Looking at books to use in class, I'm constantly surprised at how many words they use to convey so few concepts. Teaching is an optimization problem, and if you're optimizing for something else (e.g. making money), the teaching is likely to suffer.
For that reason, you're right on about distrusting blog posts. A lot of them are written in order to make money. Sometimes they also teach.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid for your work. I've made a great deal of capitalist money doing various things. But I also believe that I should make my money doing something else, and use that to fund the information-sharing portion of my life.
When it comes to teaching, I don't demand anything from my students or readers. At least not directly--students still pay tuition, and some of that goes to me. But all the ebooks and materials I write are free to use and have no ads and no tracking. The only goal is to teach as efficiently as possible, and no have money enter the picture.
Again, if one wants to make money with your blog or videos or whatever, I'm not judging. My personal ethic prohibits it for me, but of course people are free to do what they want. I just tend to value sites without advertising more than those with.
So I guess I am judging. :)
Regarding making money, I've found at least one way that I think aligns the different needs - some of the videos on my youtube channel are book reviews and summaries of books I've genuinely enjoyed and find worth recommending. Easy way to put an affiliate link in front of people who'd appreciate it, and it's not enough of a concern for me that I'd ever be tempted to recommend a book I didn't personally love just to create content.
Sometimes I'm staring at my screen and I have no clue what to even do or where to go, and I close it and then pick up a book and instantly feel better.
Starting to read a physical book sometimes is very difficult after spending time on screens, but if I can break thru the first 15 minutes where I can’t get my eyes to track the page effectively and let myself slow down enough to fully pay attention to the words in front of me, with no possibility to click anything, then I find that my mood changes and I feel happy, calm, creative, inspired. After an hour I only reluctantly give up reading the book.
Rinse and repeat everyday. Some days I wish all computers would stop working.
I then end up grabbing my phone and looking up the word/topic, and then it's back to the electronic device that I was trying to get away from with the paper book.
I do, however, read mostly from devices that I very specifically configure to be optimized for reading - and that includes blocking all notifications.
I become more convinced each day that online life is a shallow substitute for a human existence in so many small ways that will only become clear to us in retrospect.
It is a lonely thing though, so YMMV when considering your spouse or roommates.
When I read an ebook, I still feel a marked difference (overall much more relaxing and better) than reading a web page.
It keeps me away from "screens". My page count skyrocketed this past year when I started checking out ebooks from the library and reading before bed. Works even better with a partner who can go to sleep with lights off while I use the warm backlight.
1. High-quality writing relaxes me to the point that I can enjoy learning at a much deeper level
2. It’s extremely arduous to keep my BS filter constantly deployed, which it is 95% of the time I'm reading unfiltered content (blogs, Twitter, news etc)
A well-written book is a large lake of high-quality information, and so I can generally develop some trust for the author and can relax and think about things I don't know well.
There is a torrent of knowledge, but panning for wisdom is exhausting. So I think for me, rather than the form factor (blog vs book vs podcast), it really comes down to the level of refinement of the information. There are some authors that blog / write newsletters that I have developed a sense of trust for, so I can also enjoy their without the BS filter fully engaged. (Matt Levine, Ben Hunt, Scott Alexander etc)
Out of 7 or 8 books, only a minority have passed without deep deep factual errors. One specific one comes to mind - a book on "Danish Parenting" that cited a monkey study about kids and peer groups. I looked up the original study and the study author had specifically said not to cite the study on young primate behaviors in his disclaimers - he had used zoo raised primates.
Usually books are either generally pretty factual, or just repeated outright lies. "Hunt. Gather. Parent." was one I caught in multiple just plain falsehoods (and they didn't even need the cites! Just state it as an opinion!)
Obviously that is just parenting books which is a tiny niche, but I encourage you to do the same before taking a book as the gospel truth.
The funny thing is that the friends who recommended it to me are both engineers but IME even a lot of smart people don't question "scientific" studies. Parenting books in particular rely on a whole lot of readers willing to take everything at face value.
Aside: I knew a women who had a PhD and studied sleep patterns. Her pediatrician told her she needed let her baby cry it out. When she asked for justification they handed her a study that she had participated in, it was about mama cats and their kitted - completely irrelevant to any sort of human behavior. She was pretty upset by the whole thing. How many parents had been convinced by doctors completely misinterpreting her research?
A lot of justified scorn was thrown at the anti-MMR vax crowd, particularly pre-covid, but I think it's hard to understand how many people just don't have the background to look at a bunch of charts and numbers with a skeptical eye. I don't know how we are going to manage it when these days everyone can find a chart somewhere justifying everything that they already believe.
1. "When Genius Failed": about the failure of the hedge-fund LTCM
2. "The First Tycoon": Detailing Vanderbilt's life (he was a bad-ass businessman). Far more interesting than I expected.
3. "Made in America": I didn't really care about walmart or Sam Walton before reading this, but he's a man to be admired.
4. "Barbarians at the Gate": Private equity tries the largest hostile takeover ever (dramatic and exciting with a hilarious group of characters).
5. "The Smartest Guys in the Room": Enron was an absurd company run by absurd people. Jeff Skilling claims he didn't do anything wrong.
I actually read a lot LESS books than I used to. I was an avid book reader; but several things happened: 1. My time is significantly reduced by being a 43year old with kids, work, house, mortgage 2. I've read a lot, so it's.... harder to find a new idea in a book, that interests me, especially one that's worth a few hundred pages or rather has hundreds of pages of (to me) new/interesting stuff. Basically, my attention span / my ability to devote dozen hours / the value I need to extract out of each our has changed.
I agree that there's a lot of useless posts; they've been increasing in ratio for years; and now with AI I'm sure they'll increase that much more. But individuals (and even teams) who produce quality content still exist. Heck, it's not a blog, but I've literally just discovered Tom Scott on Youtube - how did I miss that for the last 5-8 years?? I'm sure there are equally great bloggers out there I've clueless of. There's definitely opportunities in helping us identify them.
Fewer.
- Stannis Baratheon
(I’m not actually a grammar nazi, I just can’t resist the joke.)
Compared to a few years ago, I don't remotely have the same enthusiasm I could have for blogposts, and on the contrary I often find the writing style to be irritating -- especially hyperlinks-rich ones, which break the flow of thought, like internalized distractions. Yet I've also started to write my own blogposts because there are some ideas that I wanted to express in that form and did not find on the internet.
My guess, based on my own experience: you have reaped what you could from the ideas that can conveniently be expressed in blogposts, and it would be very hard to find new ones that would enrich your worldview. You have to go deeper, thus find the format that is more suitable for this.
Employee blog posts from Big Tech now push the corporate agenda. Stepping out of line "has consequences", so no one speaks freely any more.
Self employed people are afraid of being crushed by Big Tech if they dissent. The result are blogs that are as interesting as reading the Pravda.
Purely technical blogs got unfocused in presentation, are largely self-promotional and rarely address interesting subjects.
"Ask HN: Relatively less known but good blogs?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258458 (6 points, 5 comments)
It did not get the number of responses I hoped for. But as a rule I avoid anything coming from mass blogging platforms like medium, substack, devto and similar sites. They may occasionally have good articles but most of the articles from these sites are poor and self-promotional. I would love to find a directory or search engine where I can search for good blogs maintained on independent websites by independent people.
I did another Ask HN now to collect links to some good articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310222
I've definitely migrated back to reading mostly books and long-form articles. I'm even considering, for the first time in my life, on paying for subscriptions of reputable newspapers and cut that off from my internet usage. It's getting too far into overwhelming territory to keep up, maybe it's my age showing making me very tired of the pull-model for consumption of news/content... I want something curated, well written and with interesting points, anything else feels like a waste of time.
Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many?
What are your thoughts?
That said, the remaining 0.x% of blog posts is insanely valuable. The low-stakes environment of blog posts (and tweets, etc) sometimes facilitates great insights you would never find in a book.
Practically speaking, my solution is to only read things that have been (1) shared by people I trust and/or (2) upvoted by a community like HN.
Articles are easy to produce and publish, there's no review and often are just another way to do self/brand promoting without real content. Good blogs are difficult to spot and to keep track. At the same time articles can give you the sense of a trend and what people are thinking, and the point of view of a niche of people.
So to give a time-quality ratio; socials < blogs/articles < books
This is a very low bar. Lower than having a podcast fact checked on NPR or a research paper on peer reviewed publication.
Think business books, biographies, testimonies of popular events, self help and diet books. The bar to pass is not if it´s remotely true or helpful, it will be if it sells. Review and edition will be on the style and writing, not on content.
Sometimes the authorś name or the press campaign surrounding the book will be enough for it to sell, with very few people actually engaging with the book in its details.
There is a funny and absolutely _not_ reviewed podcast on this theme, openly biased and not to take too seriously, but going through widely popular books that are garbage under even the minimum scrutiny: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...
What I don't enjoy - and have quickly learned to avoid - is this certain type of non-fiction book that ought to be an article or blog post. They're easy to find now, they're usually just shy of or right at 300 pages, they have a catchy core idea and they tend to expound on that idea about as much as a blog post would. The rest is just there to service the notion of having a book. Ugh. They were I think a bigger problem 3-4 years ago, but maybe that's because I've gotten better at avoiding them.
Which raises two caveats:
1. This isn't uniformly the case, and there is in fact excellent writing in all formats, though I would suggest it's getting harder to find especially by way of keyword / content-based Web search (as opposed to searching by specific title, author, or organisation).
2. There's a heck of a lot of nostalgia, survivorship, and other bias at play here. There are a great many badly-written old books and articles as well. We tend to remember the ones that are in fact good, and those also tend to be the ones most recommended. I'm struck by how old the works on curated lists of best books (fiction or nonfiction) are, especially in light of how vastly more works have been published in the 20th and 21st centuries relative to all prior time.
So, yes, there are a lot of overly-padded books which are really pretentious magazine articles, and much poorly-written copy in news and magazine stories as well. I definitely notice this and try to turn away from the form when I realise I'm reading it.
(The assessment cost of determining whether or not a text is worth reading is among the nonrecoverable costs of an overactive reading habit.) I read enough older news and magazine copy to feel reasonably confident that the problem isn't entirely in my head: writing, even within the same publications or classes of works, seems to be getting worse, with efforts to precisely attribute every last statement or source being one notable part of that within news pieces.)
That said, I too have been tending strongly toward books and more-traditional print sources (journals, magazines) than online media. The problem with the latter is that the early promise of removed editorial gatekeepers has evolved toward its rather predictable end-state: the slush pile has migrated from the editor's desk to our browser and smartphone, and we're left with the challenge of wading through dreck in search of rare gems.
It's also hard to avoid the allure of novelty and mystery. I keep having to remind myself that the odds of the best or most relevant works of all time having been written within the past 24 hours are low at best. And without unnecessarily reifying the past, there's a lot of wisdom in old works, as well as the benefit that any pressing alternate incentives for publication are now largely stripped of their manipulative capabilities. Even reading old magazines and newspapers, the advertising tends to feel quaint or charming rather than urgent. This holds even when reading works I had read at the time a decade or four ago, suggesting it's less the advertising itself than the liveness of the attempted ad-verting of my attention that's salient.
I also am finding myself relying far more on bibliographic rather than Web search to turn up materials. Not exclusively, and HN itself plays a large role. But when I find a work referenced elsewhere --- whether in an HN comment, as a podcast comment or show note, or as a mention, citation, or note in a book or paper --- those referenced works tend to have far more salience than what Google or DDG-fronted Bing suggest to me.
(I've serious regrets that Worldcat, the only global Union Catalogue I'm aware of, seems to have, seems to have gone Full Spyware: <https://twitter.com/libraryprivacy/status/157018300668967322...>. Library catalogues are otherwise generally excellent guides. I may simply have to start using university or large-public-library search tools directly.)
When I find something that looks interesting, I place it in my "toread" list in offpunk. Then I go through that list, picking random articles and reading them… in less (the terminal pager).
It means no scrolling (hit space to display next page), no images, no cruft. Only text. I really read. And a majority of "looks interesting enough to read until the end" are in fact empty or soulless. Thankfully, following blogs through RSS + some gemini capsules, I’m never out of stuff to read. I start to build a relationship with the author, not expecting quick sugar but more a long term understanding of their work and their reflections. (I also read lot of books but I assume we are speaking of computer reading here).
The big takeaway is that, in a browser, I’m not really looking for stuff to read. I’m in fact looking for the dopamine rush of finding something that could be potentially interesting if I take the time to read it. This is frightening: it’s like spending more time watching trailers than watching a good movie (wait… that’s exactly what we are doing with my wife).
For those interested: https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/
It's personally been quite effective, albeit very simple.
Funnily enough, I just finished a book without replacing it and I'm straight back on the phone :)
Anyone else try this?
It's just a different way to read. Both have very obvious, very ancient, strengths and weaknesses.
When you get sick of take out, you can go garden. When you get sick of gardening, get take out.
What I've found over the past decade or so as more books are available online (with varying levels of copyright compliance), it's possible to hit a reference and trace it often within a minute or so of searching. That's both delightful and something of a tarpit, reading lists can grow with amazing rapidity.
One of the first times I realised this was when reading through James Burke's Connections (companion book to the 1970s television series), and seeing a reference to Agricola's De re Metallica, a Renaissance-era text on mining and metallurgy still used as a reference through the 19th century.
Within a few minutes I located it (English translation, by an American couple, Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover) on the Internet Archive:
<https://archive.org/details/georgiusagricola00agri/page/n3/m...>
There's also a Project Gutenberg version: <https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/38015>
Absolutely!
I think that the hyper-twitch consumption model has become so ubiquitous that some people have forgotten how to slow down, though.
I prefer the slow model, personally, but I was born before the internet went big.
There's a lot of incentive to bump up the number of pages, so most of the time when I pick up a non-fiction book I end up regretting it and shouting into the void this could've been a blog post. Even in decently edited books I always feel like they could've been cut by at least 50 pages without losing any of the substance, but I guess nobody wants to publish a book under 200 pages.
Good articles are not easy to come by, but I never run out of them. The best ones are usually in the range of 30 min - 1 hour to consume, all of which could have easily been padded with fluff into a ~250 pages book, but they weren't and I appreciate that.
That isn't to say I don't read books, but about 90% of them are fiction noawadays. And I do mean read them, as I find that much more engaging than audiobooks (my mind drifts away, I lose the plot often). Good fictions are easy to find, much easier than say TV shows which take longer to consume, or worse get cancelled after a season or two without a satisfying end.
There are a lot of books, too. More than one could read in a lifetime, even if new ones stopped being released. Thus it doesn’t follow that quantity is the problem, or that if it is you’ll eventually be bored by books too.
Years ago I started consuming dozens of books a year. I eventually realised most non-fiction are stretched-out pamphlets: one core idea which could fit into a blog post padded with anecdotes until it reaches book length. The overwhelming majority of productivity books—including the ones typically favoured by HN—fall into this category. A better use of time is to look for an online talk the author has given; you’ll get all the book’s important information faster without the fluff.
Books get boring too. Until you start to develop an eye for quickly identifying the duds so you can abandon them early (or not get them at all). When in doubt, the 2-star GoodReads reviews will typically spell out if a book suffers from too much fluff.
All this to say I don’t think it’s a “books VS blog posts” matter, there’s a ton of garbage in both mediums. Perhaps you’ve just read fewer books than blog posts. If you’re happier with books now, enjoy it.
(I’ve excluded fiction from the conversation because I imagine you’re not talking about blog posts with short stories.)
(The books were: "The House in the Cerulean Sea" and "The Bear and the Nightingale".)
A book is just long-form writing. Other than its length, a book is fundamentally no different than any other form of written communication. There are bad books just as there are bad blog posts.
Length can be an important differentiator, for sure. But I don't ever see that as the topic of conversation. Only book vs blog vs tweet. Be more specific.
Rather than just say "books" you should say which ones.
If Alex Jones writes a book, it doesn't suddenly become better than when I see a cut up Noam Chomsky interview on TikTok. Just because Jones has more room to write his nonsense doesn't mean it is better than Chomsky dropping truth bombs inside of 15 seconds.
If you're familiar with the literature on writing itself --- fiction or nonfiction --- what becomes clear is how books are crafted. There's the idea, often research, organisation of notes and the like, writing itself, and then very often many, many, many rounds of editing and proofing, which go towards a result which ideally reads well, is factually accurate (where such things matter), that educational materials follow good pedagogy, is well cited and referenced, has needless fat trimmed, etc., etc.
Traditional publishing has multiple edit and filter points, from initial acquisition through revisions and translations. The upside is (potentially) well-crafted works, the downside is that many proposals don't get green-lit. The promise of the Web was breaking that editorial chokepoint, which has its own pros and cons.
Yes, of course it's possible to craft bad books, and as The Good Book notes, there is no end.
But blogging and article-writing frequently cuts many of these corners. Yes, a domain-expert can write a good blog, and yes, the process of blogging itself can be part of the process of book-creation, with feedback and corrections to the (error-prone, roughly-hewn) blog posts itself contributing to that finished product.
Books based on dialogues, lectures, commentaries, and essays are also a timeless form (Plato, Sun Tzu, Al-Kindi, Averroes, Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Feynman's Physics, all come to mind), and that's one useful way of coming up with a book-length compendium of material, though the result may lack in an overall coherence. (Overall coherence of course is not the principle goal of such compendia, rather, it is to create a usefully-curated set of realated or interacting works.)
I've been increasingly disappointed in the focus of many early digital-text pioneers on creating an end result that's specific to the domain, rather than on the process of writing works which is afforded by digital tools to increase capability and usefulness of something which, after all, ultimately is read in a linear fashion, if not necessarily how the author or publisher lineralised it. Reading is finding a path through text, the presented structure is itself only one path. We read novels through; we work through textbooks; we consult or query dictionaries, phone directories (if you remember those), and encyclopedias.
Concepts such as Niklas Luhmann's Zettlekasten, whilst analogue and paper-based are far more innovative in the sense of restructuring the authoring process itself. More modern tools would include Zotero and Calibre, perhaps.
Mike Tyson dictated his book. Self help gurus pay editors and writers to spin their 10 steps into a full "book."
Not all books use such a prestigious process. In fact, most don't.
Per my initial comment, it is not books but well crafted literature at any length. Using the term "book" to describe that is lazy and ignores the many excellent short form pieces and overwhelming amount of garbage books that get produced every day.
There's very little about a book that's innate, rather, conventions from size to font to structure and organisation, contents, indices, notes, pagination for eff's sake, all had to be arrived at and designed.
That's happened over centuries, and represents a great deal of embedded wisdom.
I become painfully aware of this when reading online, whether on desktop (can be OK with a suitably large screen), laptop (horrible), OLED tablet (OK, but not great), or e-ink device (far better, though still has limitations).
A book's robustness, persistence, and flexibility of access are hard to match. Digital gives options for search, access, and automation, which can be handy.
What most plagues online book formats, I'm concluding after using an e-ink device for nearly two years, is displays. Emissive, low-resolution, wrong format, and difficulty in reading under bright illumination. E-ink addresses most of these (at sufficient size: 8" minimum, 10" or 13" is preferable for detailed works).
That still leaves a lot to the specific technical format and typography of individual e-books, and there are designs which work better than others.
There's also the mechanics of ebook reader software, most especially of navigation and annotation. The directness of physical objects (leafing or flipping through pages, scribbling a quick note in pencil or pen, dog-earing, physical bookmarks) is lost, though good designs can come reasonably close.
(I'm trying to find a book on, erm, The Book, which I'd found and believe is somewhere in my (electronic) collection, though it's been eluding me for the past quarter hour or so.)
Edit: Found it. Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016)
<https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393244793>
<https://archive.org/details/bookcovertocover0000hous>
<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5D3A0B91464FE40568F5BBA...>
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/956980330>
Not without some irony, a book which is far better in print or PDF than ePub format.
But… Apart from being nice to look at, a (very big) bookshelf is such a waste of space I wish there where something in between a real book and an ebook.
To me it sounds like you are bored or tired of reading about the same material. It's burnout really. It might be the simple that there isn't much new or interesting material in your area of interest and most blog posts are rehashing the same info you already know.
Taking a break is fine. Maybe its time to explore hobbies you've been interested in perusing but have not yet had the time.
I've pondered this recently. On the book front I feel I've read a lot of styles and stories and I now need something a bit different to hold my attention. I've sought interesting and weird books. It's not that the books I'm rejecting are bad or worthless, they just feel like they're treading the same tropes. One thing I don't often find is humourful writing that gives an ordinary story some spark and wit.
The information on the internet is unbounded. You know this, you are aware even if subliminally, no matter how you control your browser by blocking ads, pop ups etc. An unbounded information horizon is destabilizing. There is always more (possibly better) information a click away. It's hard to justify keeping attention on just one article. I even read a paper newspaper article with more attention than the same article online.
Of course pop ups, ads, the incredible commodification of attention, has made this much worse, but the problem is inherent to the internet.
When I open a book, there are two covers, marking beginning and end. It's awesome. In between is a place for deep attention.
There have been books that have enriched my life. It's deep focus, not shallow scanning. I think there is something soul crushing about the shallow attention we are left with after years on the job. (Slack & Teams are part of the problem.)
Even with adblock on my principle tablet browser, sites such as the Washington Post leave large whitespace gaps within an article where ad spots have been removed. I've counted through these manually at times and believe that there are frequently around ten, possibly more, ads withing the body of a story with not many more paragraphs than that.
Even before we get to sidebars, pop-ups, and other interstitials, it just makes me tired.
Reader Mode can remove many of these though even then some additional tuning may be required. A further problem is the lack of standardisation in how articles are structured, making assumptions about how to apply formatting also fraught.
(As a concrete example: I'm fond of bolding lead-lines of articles with a drop cap. Normally this can be applied to "p:first-of-type:first-line", except where, say, and article wraps each <p> tag in a <div> or other element. Mind that this is a self-imposed problem. Point is that if document-structure conventions were followed, I'd be able to consistently use a cleaner styling. It isn't, so I cannot.)
I am an avid book-collector and much prefer to pick up a technical manual and find guidance there, but at the same time my job demands fluency with online documentation, plus e.g. Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc.
Personally I like the dead-tree feel and heft of a book, and the fact it doesn't require a screen or battery. I can curl up with it and I don't have a bright square of light blasting into my retinas. I could annotate it (criminal!) if I wanted to, or certainly bookmark it. It has the same features as online material in that regard.
I tried the Amazon Fire(?) reader-thingy for fiction books and couldn't get on with it at all, despite the paper feel/look.
The fact that I can carry 100s or 1,000s of references with ease is especially useful.
The display is (mostly) reflective, works under direct sunlight, has exceptional battery life (when used only as an e-book reader, if you're surfing the Web or using apps, with WiFi and frontlighting enabled, it falls precipitously), and is very nearly as crisp as paper (200 DPI vs. 300--600 for most laserprinters).
Internet was always full of shit but when everything linked to everything else there was a way for search engines to find the valuable posts, with search engine being a gateway to everything that is no longer the case.
Also because they are so shallow...
The solution to this was to save the article as a PDF and drop it in a 'read later' folder. The PDFs are synced to my phone via Syncthing Fork, and look great on my foldable phone. You can make PDFs in A5 format so they're narrower and more phone friendly.
This not only solves the "format the document for my device", as ePub is a liquid-layout format, but also allows you to combine a number of articles into a single file (you can add more later), which is useful for organising reading by topic, project, or date. And you can read the articles using dedicated e-book software (Kobo, PocketBook Reader, FBReader, or native e-reader apps). I've found that especially useful.
More: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107958709435468728>
(For Android only AFAIU.)
So I'm also reading more books - both digitally and on paper. I find the 'non-fiction could be a blog-post' attitude just baffling for the sort of books I've been reading lately - including a biography of Napolean, another book about his Russian campaign, and a really fascinating biography of Casanova that was linked from HN (the type of post that brings me back here, in spite of the tribal nonsense).
There's so much more a sense of 'mental nourishment' and intentionality from reading a book, than if I'm mindlessly clicking through a sequence of links.
btw the RSS reader really gives a sense of the 'abandonment' of blogs: hundreds of blogs on my list haven't published anything for years.
I had that feeling too, until I realized that it is just a matter of finding new feeds. Unlike media houses, we cannot expect individuals to continue to produce interesting content, and that is why RSS feeds dry off. However, new ones are popping up all the time and it is just a matter of finding good ones. I think RSS is thriving.
Posts like the Expert Beginner series [0] and anything ACOUP [1] I'll read and re-read. I keep a list of articles that have shaped my way of thinking. Most of what is on Medium et al can be discarded. Similarly, large amounts of books, mainly non-fiction, can be lobbed on the same pile. Many of which would have been better off as an article in the first place.
0 - https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...
1 - https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
For me, it is the ease of finding the "best" on a certain topic (by rating...). This is because books are more "centralized" (Amazon, goodreads...) and identifiable (isbn). Web Articles, on the contrary, are more often like an ever receding stream: blogs, monthly magazines, Hacker news feed...
Concerning centralization, I wish sites like longreads [1] and Lindy Hacker News [2] were more popular, wide-ranging and organized (tags, ratings...)
And with respect to identification, I wish there was the equivalent of DOI for web articles : You can easily find that influential scholarly paper from the 60s, but you may never recover that brilliant magazine article from the 2000s (and search is getting worse)
Blog posts are another thing where there are many, many, many of them available, but basically zero reviews and recomendations from friends, and maybe, sometimes you get some quality-indicator if it's reposted here or on reddit and you see the upvote ratio... otherwise you never know what you'll going to get.
So, as with books, you read the first paragraph, sometimes you stop reading there, sometimes you scroll down and "read" vertically while scrolling (just looking at text to see if it contains something interesting) and many times it doesn't, so when you scroll to the bottom after 7 seconds of scrolling, you just close it and move on.
I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Some bloggers have gone to SEO optizimation schemes (as with recipes, where instead of a recipe, you get the authors childhood story first, then his family situation, what s/he likes to do on saturdays, etc..), some keep it short, some insert unneeded politcs everywhere, and some also manage to write something interesting and readable to the end. If you started reading books so often and unselectively as you do blogposts, you'd stop reading a lot more books too.
This is why I say right now books are across the board a better idea than blogposts or videos, but I'm not 100% certain that can't change? Some kind of Wikipedia esque filter could perhaps accelerate this?
One of the downsides of blogging is that bloggers very often do not have editors. I think just about every substack I see that isn't maintained by a seasoned writer or journalist tends to veer towards being far too wordy and meandering. People don't naturally understand how to maintain a reader's interest and remain sharply focused on the thesis of their piece. That's a skill that needs a lot of honing, and even great writers have a lot of trouble keeping things tight without a good editor to help.
There are a lot of posts people make where the central premise is good and I'm interested to see what they're saying about it, but the journey to get there is too long, involves examples and metaphors that add more confusion than clarity, belabors points that don't need belaboring, involves unnecessary digressions into tangential topics that would have best been saved to develop into a separate piece, and a number of other writing sins. Freelance blog-post editors should be more common.
They talk about the distinction between reading a book where you have no distractions and no "next" task to move on to and reading on a device - where you are a mere click away from other information & stimulation.
In order to spend actual time reading articles you need to get into a state where you aren't reading to be done with the article and don't care how much time you spend in this state which is pretty hard.
Apps like Pocket/Upnext/Matter/Readwise help, but I find that it takes more than this. People often send their articles to a kindle to facilitate this kind of reading.
There's just way too much fluff stuffed into a lot of the books you see marketed for professionals to read, in particular. I definitely enjoy the quality of prose in classic works of non-fiction, especially histories, but most of the new stuff I'd never make it through without a summarization app.
I guess I'm almost the opposite, I read HN every day, and I usually read the articles, and then that's about it. I might check article of the day on Wikipedia. I just don't read as much anymore unless it's for enjoyment, which is usually fiction.
I cannot read blog posts on my computer but I can read this way.
It has a very nice feature. You read the articles offline (after you sync the kobo with pocket), and when you click on the blog links, it presents you with the option of connect to the internet or store the link in pocket. That way you can read the link later and focus on the blog post
On the other hand, books are often seen as a more immersive and satisfying reading experience, and it is possible that the perceived "deeper" or "more valuable" reading experience that they offer is leading to a resurgence in their popularity. It is also important to note that reading habits are different for people and their preference can change over time and also varied with life stage and personal circumstances.
The only blog posts that I read diligently and thoroughly are Bartosz Ciechanowski's masterworks: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
1. There are more well-written books than blogs. 2. New books are more discoverable than new blogs.
There are more well-written books, because 1) there's a longer history of books being written, and 2). books bring money. Popular books bring tons of money. Blogs on the other hand, is much less remunerative. As a result, if you are going to write something with a lot of effort and care, something packed with information and backed with research, why not publish it?
Books are more discoverable, in the sense that they are usually much more advertised than blogs. Authors and publishers will want to push and promote their books, to books stores, to Amazon, to Google/Meta, to book tubers, and whatever ad platforms out there.
Blog writers, even the really good ones, are mostly laissez faire about promoting their own website. In fact, blogs with aggressive marketing are usually shit blogs.
Blogs are easier to consume, but obviously you cannot expect every author (especially the tecnnical ones) to be a proficient and solid writer or to have paid editors and reviewers.
The problem with many books is that you realize they are crap halfway through the investment. The investment for blogs is much smaller.
I'm sick of social media, Youtubers, influencers, and everyone else proclaiming to be experts with their clickbait titles. I just read books now. It's mentality more simulating and healthier.
What's strange is that I'm not a very visual learner - I only understand things if I read about them. But even that instinct is now giving way to video content for learning new things now.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book>
This applies mostly to nonfiction, though there are aspects which apply to fiction as well.
Adler also addresses the "what books do you recommend" with a list of 137 suggestions which are a good start (though of course, not an exhaustive list):
<https://www.tosummarise.com/2022/11/26/mortimer-adlers-readi...>
Based on a True Story: (Not) A Memoir (Norm Macdonald - 2016) - Humor
Deadlines Don’t Care if Janet Doesn’t Like Her Photo (David Thorne - 2021) - Humor (And other books by David Thorne)
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (Ananyo Bhattacharya - 2022) - Documentary
Memory Machines - The Evolution of Hypertext (Belinda Barnet) - Kinda about how the web was born and about interesting dead branches
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - really funny https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
To me, it feels like we have reached a point where information gathering and learning is getting slower and harder due to filler bloat and other distractions. I recognize this most when I go back to a new book or online text after having read in an old book.
Sometimes you'll find an article that is as good as a book but other times I read a book proceeding an article and then wish the author would have started by reading some books themselves.
I find other long form content like podcasts or filmed presentations can sometimes hit that quality mark of books too.
Articles / tweets are good for learning the name of a concept I've never heard of.
Books / podcasts / YouTube are a good way to deep dive on the actual concept itself.
I was trying to force myself to read a book about probability, and I despise math (especially proofs down to first principles) but I made it a duty. However even on Kindle it's brutal.
News articles seem purposely long in words, but thin in information.
Hacker news posts are one of my favorite go-tos, but admittedly I find myself embroiled in the back and forth of people's comments, like I'm seeking out a deep argument I can glean information from in a sort of Socratic-method-by-voyeurism.
Life is too short for content that's not worthwhile (seriously).
If you're a serious reader, and you live upto 70+ year old, maybe you can finish off 15k books on various topics.
Library of congress alone has 38 million books. That's a meagre 0.04% of the content available at the great library.
Thus, the key skill seems not to be reading, but skipping the non relevant stuff. Get better at skipping stuff that's not worth it given our short lives!
Interesting perspective. My experience so far is that I've come across very few blog posts, at least good-quality ones. I do agree that it's hard to find the good ones tho.
I also have this feeling that books are becoming stronger somehow. I'm big fan of books in general and I tend to read them cover-to-cover as they work best for me compared to video courses and other mediums.
Books on the other hand, especially literature, are usually the exact opposite. Money-grubbing self-help/how-to-become-world's-greatest-entrepreneur/Paulo Coelho tier prints are excluded.
I read a book a week. But I could still argue there are more treasures like the 2 above. They are rare, but they do exist.
in theory a site like HN should pre-filter them for me so that i'll only see stuff i'm likely to like, but mostly does not work.
i generally like professional, paid work that has been edited -- fact-checked, etc. -- it's just a lot more likely i will like that work because the quality is generally much higher. but you sacrifice a lot, namely, instead of getting the raw viewpoint of the author, you get viewpoint of the publication owner.
i'd guess the solution is manifold, but prob includes publicly-funded authorship.
If you want actual insight you need deep research which is most often found in books.
Also, Books have chapter breaks and flow based on that, which "long-reads" articles don't match.
OP, do share which books you have been reading.
Blogs are better than ever for learning about topics that are still developing (LLMs, startups).
I vacillate between the two as I get into different topics.
You need to write one blog post a week, minimum. Three a week, daily even. For years and decades. If you don't regularly publish a new post, your blog withers, and if you stop entirely, your blog dies.
It's hard to have that many new things to say, let alone things of value.
That impacts videos, books, articles, blogs, emails, conversations, and so on.
It’s not “TL;DR” but it’s similar, and is not actually an artifact of ADHD or attention economy gimmickry or anything other than recognizing that my most valuable non-renewable resource deserves better allocation.
The day after stable diffusion appeared people were already blogging about it, long form writing can never be that fast…
Even worse, blogs often are the only free source of insight, with books and papers locked behind paywalls.