There's an unstated assumption here that the reason people read books (especially popular non-fiction) is to extract the maximum usable information content from

There's an unstated assumption here that the reason people read books (especially popular non-fiction) is to extract the maximum usable information content from them over the long-term and that anything less than that is a failure. I think that is fundamentally misconceived. The primary goal of popular non-fiction is to entertain. It is read for pleasure and the only reason it happens to be about things that are true is that readers derive a little extra pleasure from prose that they think may have some relevance to the outside world. If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and recall nothing but find it 6-9 hours of time well-spent, the book has completely achieved its goal. If you get a couple of good anecdotes out of it that you can use at parties later, even better. Not to mention the social cachet of being an intellectual who reads non-fiction for fun. This otherwise very intelligent essay falls into a common failure mode I see. If you look out in the world and see everyone obviously "doing it wrong", the odds of them all being stupid while you have sole insight are very slim. Instead, it is most often the case that they are doing it right for a goal that is different from the one you presume they have. (There is also the obvious criticism that if the author feels linear narrative is a poor medium... why did they use it for their essay?)