19 ms·

I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

• ivan_burazin 4y ago
  Agreed. Most blogs are now created solely for the point of generating content, in the hopes of generating leads/clicks. If you want actual insight you need deep research which is most often found in books.
• johlits 4y ago
  We are searching for quality now in this AI driven age.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    I agree, but there is also a ton of shitty books, still I'am more eager to read the entire book, than for example 10 blog posts. It seems that blog posts are just to 'thin' and not providing too much value.
    • dgb23 4y ago
      I've read incredibly insightful articles online. One of the things that help is RSS and self-curation.
      • sasha_fishter 4y ago
        I agree. I never said that online articles are shitty, I just can't force myself to read it properly.
      • manmal 4y ago
        There are RSS directories out there, like https://iosdevdirectory.com https://iosdevdirectory.com - albeit they are so massive that curation is needed again.
• bamboozled 4y ago
  I've got this new strategy where I just leave a few books around the house and I've building a habit where I just reach for a book instead of my phone. 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?
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Interesting idea. I usually have books on the shelf that can be easily reached. Also I read every day, and after a few months it is just a habit. I like the feeling when I focus only on the book. Even though I don't have distraction from tech and other stuff, I have my mind to conquer. So it's easier just to fight with you mind than with mind and tech and all other distractions.
    • molly0 4y ago
      I think I’ve unconsciously started to “plant” books around the house and it works as a primer like - oh that book was interesting I should read it again/something similar.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• epolanski 4y ago
  I read the articles and books that interest me. 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.
• rr888 4y ago
  I wish I could do this, as books are far more rewarding. However I keep getting distracted by regular browsing & SM.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    We all have this issue. I just turn off everything and get a book in my hands. I started reading some easy books like adventures or something like that. And then I just start searching for some psychology / psychology books, as I have great interest in them.
  • niemandhier 4y ago
    Try audiobooks, I usually listen for 30 minutes before sleep. It’s not great for math and cs but philosophy and history work well.
  • Lapsa 4y ago
    consider quitting social media. what helped me best to do that was consciously recognizing ratio of time I enjoyed vs time I just got annoyed (by advertisements, censorship, dumb opinions by old school mates, all the political agendas circling) - it's like 1:9 or something.
• woolion 4y ago
  I think formats are better suited to express certain types of ideas than others ("the medium is the message"). Blogposts tend to be ideal to express fairly short, singular ideas. Books should develop an entire thought system and connect various ideas, which take much longer, both in producing and consuming. The range of what you can express is also much more expanded, since you need the person to be in the right state of mind to understand or accept an idea; with a book, you can slowly lead them to that state. 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.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Yes! It seems that blog posts are 90% written for self promotion, or to express thoughts so we can save them somewhere for later.
  • dpkrjb 4y ago
    The trap in hyperlink rich blogs is clicking every link the moment you come upon it and essentially depth first read your way through an idea.
    • namaria 4y ago
      Clicking links in order is hardly equivalent to a depth-first traversal. Blog posts are not a data format.
  • evanwise 4y ago
    To be fair, sometimes a single idea is difficult enough that it deserves an entire book.
• f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  I find that articles and blogs are good for questions, books are good for answers - or at least an attempt at that answer. 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.
• parasec 4y ago
  yes. The ADHD fulfilling dopamine rush has a consequence on your brain chemistry. I started reading books in addition to blog posts, articles, etc. and it had a positive outcome on my mood. I'm reducing my internet-dopamine time more now.
• effnorwood 4y ago
  [dead]
• molly0 4y ago
  I’m a firm believer that the UX of reading physical books beats every other alternative. Looking forward to when this is no longer the case.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    What's underappreciated by many is how much the book is a highly-crafted and optimised product. 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://wwnorton.com/books/9780393244793> <https://archive.org/details/bookcovertocover0000hous https://archive.org/details/bookcovertocover0000hous> <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5D3A0B91464FE40568F5BBA66771274F https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5D3A0B91464FE40568F5BBA...> <https://www.worldcat.org/title/956980330 https://www.worldcat.org/title/956980330> Not without some irony, a book which is far better in print or PDF than ePub format.
• rlgth 4y ago
  I no longer read blog posts because they got worse. There are no longer any active quality bloggers like Steve Yegge or Joel Spolsky. 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.
  • piva00 4y ago
    They might even exist but are so much harder to find nowadays that I ended up on the same spot. I haven't read or followed blogs of anyone for the past 10 years at least. 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.
  • distcs 4y ago
    Agree! That is why I did an Ask HN sometime back: "Ask HN: Relatively less known but good blogs?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34258458 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34310222
    • sasha_fishter 4y ago
      Seems like a great idea for building a product :)
• carom 4y ago
  I'm taking a break from a few social media sites right now (not hn). I've noticed I suddenly have time to listen to books, read my email, text my friends. When you don't have a dumping ground for every thought you have a lot more to say. Similarly when you aren't reading other people's thoughts or ads constantly you seek out things to read. Only a few days in but it is nice.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  There are good books and there are bad books... both subjectively and objectively. If a book is still bad (for me) after a few chapters of reading it, it stop reading it, because it's a waste of time. Usually I do atleast some research before starting reading a book, but sometimes even really high goodreads scores and recommendations from friends don't mean i'll personally like the book, and I'll still stop reading it. 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.
• beardyw 4y ago
  With a no phones in the bedroom policy there are always one or two books by my bed.
• Baxxter 4y ago
  As others have said, books and articles have a different purpose and audience. I enjoy reading books. But there are many, many good blogs and online periodicals that offer quality that you would not want to find in a book. For instance... 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.
  • levesque 4y ago
    The brevity can be an advantage, I'd much prefer a dense 200-300 page essay to a long drawn out 500-page argument where the author loses both themselves and the reader. But I agree that some of those non-fiction books can be poorly written -- or thought out? They sometimes read like a string of supporting evidence for the author's hypothesis, while blatantly disregarding the evidence that does not support the argument.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    There's a strong element of "now" vs. "then" both being expressed in this thread and in my own experience of various media, where contemporary media seems ... low in reward:effort ratio, which can be said of both online and dead-tree published media. 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/1570183006689673222 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.)
• FpUser 4y ago
  I read an awful lot of books. Blogs - rarely, mostly glance over.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Yes. I like that. Blogs for inspiration, books for knowledge.
  • trgn 4y ago
    Same here. Thanks OP for bringing this up, I wondered about this too. I lost attention span for online content, and reading a lot more books (fiction and non-fiction) than I used to instead. Change was fairly abrupt.
• MisterTea 4y ago
  Are the books you read similar in subject to the blog posts you read? I bet they are not. 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.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    It's similar. I.e. psychology of users, building startups as I'm right now building one, so I want to learn as much as possible. Blogs are not bad, I personally just loose ambition to read it and absorb it like I do when I read the book. I know it's totally different medium, and blogs are fast, books are slow, but I just waisting time scrolling through post, while I can read a book meanwhile.
    • MisterTea 4y ago
      Perhaps the issue is the style of writing? SEO speak has ruined many blogs in an attempt to bring in more ad money resulting in low quality content called blogspam.
• niemandhier 4y ago
  Some topics move to fast. Until someone wrote a book, blogs sometimes are the only source of insight. 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.
• saalweachter 4y ago
  You can write one good book, and it's fine. Sure, people may ask you to write another, and one book is not a career as a writer, but if the book is good it can stand on its own and be read and enjoyed and learned from for decades. 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.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  I have noticed the same, however my conclusion is different. Typically when you read a book, your average book has more signal than your average web article or blog post. That's because more filtering has happened, like time, editors, etc. sometimes I find good web content (mostly from the top HN posts) and I don't just scroll, but I read. When I find myself scrolling the first few lines, I immediately close the link.
  • input_sh 4y ago
    My experience is completely opposite. 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.
    • fedeb95 4y ago
      Sorry, I haven't mentioned that I mostly read old books (at least 100 years old usually) and very rarely new things. I think the only living author I've read is Taleb. History is a powerful filter.
• a13o 4y ago
  I stopped reading non-fiction books. Most of them have about a blog post worth of ideas, but the publisher had the author pad it out to X00 pages because that's what makes their business model make sense. 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.
  • WA 4y ago
    Similar here. If a non-fiction book interests me, I check out the table of contents, try to derive the content from this and read a bunch of reviews on goodreads.com Most of the time, it's clear that there's not much more in the book.
  • levesque 4y ago
    Every medium has its gold nuggets. A lot of podcasts are garbage, even amongst the ones with interesting topics -- nothing more than a few bros hanging out and improvising on a topic with a little preparation. There are some very high quality podcasts in the mix, and the same is true of non-fiction books.
    • jventura 4y ago
      One podcast I really like is The Art of Manliness podcast [0]. I learn about a lot of interesting topics and get good book recommendations from it. All episodes are interviews with book authors regarding a specific book. 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. [0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/podcast/ https://www.artofmanliness.com/podcast/
      • medvezhenok 4y ago
        Two podcasts that I like, and pay monthly for both (more econ/macro/geopolitics-focused): The first does a lot of research for every episode, and the second has ~30 years of knowledge about markets, trading, and goes into such depth in his episodes that it's hard to find equivalent level information elsewhere. I also subscribed to Real Vision at some point, but I find that I simply don't have enough time to utilize all of the resources on there. One episode per week for each of the podcasts below is manageable though - to keep yourself up to date. https://hiddenforces.io/ https://hiddenforces.io/ https://www.grant-williams.com/grant-williams-podcast/ https://www.grant-williams.com/grant-williams-podcast/
• Lapsa 4y ago
  maybe I've seen too much or have grown old and grumpy - but I just can't find any mind blowing articles anymore. most of the stuff I find somewhat boring and/or irrelevant. also reading books more than ever (brb finishing up last couple chapters of 'War of the Worlds').
• elias94 4y ago
  Books are curated content that has been reviewed by editors and are usually well written. Better if the books is printed by a relevant publishing company and even better if the book has been translated which usually means is relevant. Also there are so many books and so many topics to read that is impossible to get bored. 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
  • makeitdouble 4y ago
    > Books are curated content that has been reviewed by editor 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/id1651876897 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/if-books-could-kill/id...
    • aflag 4y ago
      It's not a bar. It's a process. Good authors + good editors are a great process to create good content. A single author + no editors is a significantly worse process.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Depends how you define "Blog Post". There are web pages / articles I still read - I'll check out things by Derek Sivers, Patrick McKenzie/Bits About Money, Money Stuff by Matt Levine, all by local HN recommendations. Similarly, I find a lot of good one-off recommendations on HN; is the hit ratio 100%, or even 50%, goodness no. But signal-to-noise ratio is still worth my time. I will read Thom Hogan on photography more than weekly. Science Babe's blogs/posts are interesting enough, as well as other more "traditional" science / astronomy bloggers. 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.
  • namaria 4y ago
    I'd think having less time available to read would make this time more valuable and thus nudge you towards more dense, higher quality long form reading. Seems to be a trap: I have less time so I will read these low effort, short texts instead. So you spend more of a limited resource on a lower yield activity.
  • jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    > I actually read a lot LESS books than I used to. Fewer. - Stannis Baratheon (I’m not actually a grammar nazi, I just can’t resist the joke.)
    • FlyingSnake 4y ago
      I am still not over how spectacularly that TV series imploded into nothingness.
• fullshark 4y ago
  The amount of poor quality blogposts, in particular the volume of poor quality blogposts that are covert advertisements for something (a product, a book, the author's self image, the company they run, etc) just means you are very likely reading something that's a waste of time. I've adapted and find books to be more likely valuable information if not particularly fresh information.
  • wellanyway 4y ago
    But books have the same problem. Ten pages of information spread onto 300 pages to sell the copy.
    • fullshark 4y ago
      Yeah a lot of general business books in particular have this issue. I mostly stopped reading those unless it's business history or biography.
• escapedmoose 4y ago
  I’m having the same experience as you. It’s still a bit difficult to find a good book, but not as difficult as it is to find a single worthwhile blog post. Even the ones I used to enjoy just feel stale now. The blogs section of my bookmarks used to have at least 30 sites that I visited regularly. Now there are 0.
• bxfhjcvu 4y ago
  [dead]
• fergie 4y ago
  Love fiction, love a good blog post, can't for the life of me abide self-help nonsense, especially when it's dressed up as "management strategy".
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Self help are wrong terminology imo. I'm just listening (I order a physical book), a Dale Carnegie's 'How to win friends and influence people', and I think it's one of the best book I have read. It's full of examples and published in 1936! Still relevant today, lot's of a good advices and things we knew but forgot. Nothing pushy, just logical.
    • fergie 4y ago
      To be fair- that is just about the only good one I have read.
• ergonaught 4y ago
  I’ve simply grown impatient (intolerant really) with people who appear to lack respect for my time (and perhaps their own). 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.
• atomicnature 4y ago
  I'd like to highlight a key idea for pack rats of knowledge/scholarship. 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!
• latexr 4y ago
  > Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? 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.)
  • thechao 4y ago
    I've started reading a lot more, again. I just read 10-15 years "in arrears". There's so much highly-produced crap, out there, it boggles the mind. The immediate last two books I read that violated this rule (both fantasy; both "top shelf") should've been novellas, but were made novel-length. The authors' writing skills were insufficient to carry the length; as a result I just gave up on what were, otherwise, good stories (and good authors). Personally, I think this is an editor/publisher thing. (The books were: "The House in the Cerulean Sea" and "The Bear and the Nightingale".)
  • Escapado 4y ago
    Sometimes those anecdotes make those points engaging and I sometimes find myself re-telling them when having conversations about these topics with others. If information density is all you are after then I would agree, but argue that reading can be much more than that. And when it comes to non-fiction books on stem topics I found the vast majority I have read are usually really dense.
• francisofascii 4y ago
  Books are more relaxing. Maybe because blog posts are on a screen, which is associated with work, which is all on a screen. If there was a physical book of good blog posts, I would buy it.
• dev_0 4y ago
  [dead]
• jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  Same here. I don’t have the patience any longer.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• digitalsushi 4y ago
  Didn't this sentiment come with hypertext? If books had clickable links we'd have a difficult time finishing them. 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.
  • gorjusborg 4y ago
    > Didn't this sentiment come with hypertext? If books had clickable links we'd have a difficult time finishing them. 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.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Academic and some nonacademic books have citations and/or footnotes. Those can be followed, though with somewhat more effort than simply clicking a link. As a positive, however, proper citations rarely suffer linkrot, though some references are obscure, and if you're looking at ancient works, there may well be entirely lost works. 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/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/georgiusagricola00agri/page/n3/m...> There's also a Project Gutenberg version: <https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/38015 https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/38015>
• scaradim 4y ago
  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269576698_Are_Western_Australian_adolescents_keen_book_readers https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269576698_Are_Weste... https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/book-and-reading-statistics/ https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/book-and-reading-statistics/ https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/RaRExec.pdf https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/RaRExec.pdf
• rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  I'm 70% into the 6th book of Dune Chronicles. I've never read so much literature like now. On the same token, I completely lost passion for non-fiction and mainstream news. The latter became so unbearable to me that I can't even scroll pages anymore. I do enjoy reading some blogs though, which I visit frequently for new insights. I've learned about most of them via HN.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    This service is very nice if you want to still have general awareness of what's going on in the outside world without it dominating your full attention. One text per day, summarizing the most important news in 1-2 informative sentences each. https://thenewpaper.co/ https://thenewpaper.co/
• cainxinth 4y ago
  I save any article too long to read right away (been using instapaper for like a decade). Then, when I finally have downtime (e.g. sitting on an airplane for hours), I work my way through them. Or, I’ll use the text to speech function and listen to them like podcasts while out and about.
• wink 4y ago
  I noticed I'm no longer reading books. Maybe it's just that I haven't found anything enticing the last few years but in the same way as I don't like watching movies anymore I can't seem to manage to sit down and read a novel. I did read a few technical books, but as someone with 2 kinda full bookcases this is some kind of shock development.
  • jemmyw 4y ago
    It comes and goes for me but in recent times I've found it harder and harder to read through a book. Similarly I don't watch movies, I find them very hard to sit through. 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.
• rchaud 4y ago
  I reached a similar point. Articles became an immediate skip because I started expecting the site to show a paywall or a email signup, or a block of links after each paragraph...it was exhausting. 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.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    EinkBro is a browser aimed at, as the name suggests, e-ink devices. That said, it has some really useful features, including a "save as ePub" option. 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 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107958709435468728> (For Android only AFAIU.) <https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.plateaukao.einkbro/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.plateaukao.einkbro/>
• jackschultz 4y ago
  I've made a change recently, where if there's a blog post, web article, magazine articles, or even watch a video, I need to take notes on it. Obsidian is great for that, where I can put a link in, and it pops out a page for me to write any thoughts that come to mind from it, even if it's a single sentence or two. It's a slight barrier, but makes the feeling of reading something much more worthwhile, and also is interesting to make connections to other things I've read.
  • lexoj 4y ago
    Which plugin pops out a page from a link?
    • jackschultz 4y ago
      QuickAdd and Templater. It's a custom macro that takes the url, does a request, pulls the relevant information (site name, title) from the head, and then uses a capture to use the template to put the file in the correct path. Lowers the number of steps required to get a good page to take notes.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    That's a good idea. I've seen Obsidian, but I'm taking notes on notepad, just to be sure I write it with hand. It's so hard for me because I was typing more than writing, so I kinda forget to write :). But I like your approach, notes are great because 5 minutes after reading something you forget almost all of it :)
    • jackschultz 4y ago
      Notepad works too! I think the key is to force yourself to actively think when reading, and if you don't want to do that, then don't bother reading. Obsidian helps because of the ease to linking other notes, and that I think it a big benefit when you start having a bunch of notes.
• topaz0 4y ago
  What you may notice from the other replies is that many of them conflict with each other. The reason is that this has much more to do with the rhythms of your own life and interests than with global trends. When I first started reading HN I would read several links a day. I don't think the quality of the links has changed that much -- indeed, many of the links are reruns that I've seen here 2, 5 or 10 years ago -- instead I have moved on to have more focused interests, and a higher level understanding in those areas, so that fewer of the posts are useful to me. (Meanwhile, I have much less time to read in general at my present stage of life, so I also read fewer books and magazines). I suspect there are also meaningful global trends, but extrapolating from your own experience will lead you astray.
  • singedproxy 4y ago
    This is a sensible take that could be applied to almost anything else in life with some exceptions. Do whatever works best for you, but don't generalize much outside of your practical experience.
• 2devnull 4y ago
  I read more online, both blogs and books. For what read, a lot of books are available for free online, and much easier to look up words, names, the odd bit of Latin or French etc… I can read much faster when not moving my eyes and flipping pages. The biggest factor is comfort. Books tend to hurt my neck. They’re often heavy to hold. I have to constantly shift around to turn pages. When reading off a large monitor the text is big, and I don’t have to look down, so no neck strain, and I can scroll with my mouse. I still love and buy books but read more online.
• surume 4y ago
  Honestly, I wish I could side with books for this for non-fiction (I'm old school), but often I find that much of it is filler. E.g. Wim Hof's book - as much as I love the WHM, it really could have been done in a chapter or two. The rest was just rehashing the same concepts again and again. That said, I have a real soft spot for College text-books. The newer ones are often beautifully written.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Lindy" filter is instructive here. Age is a pretty good filter, so it's just overwhelmingly likely that an old book that's stuck around is going to be better than something newer. 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?
• brunojppb 4y ago
  > Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? 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.
• coldtea 4y ago
  >Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Also because they are so shallow...
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    On which point, Nicholas Carr's The Shallows is relevant: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows_(book)>
• ryzvonusef 4y ago
  Articles/blogs are hampered by SEO requirements, and padding to induce scrolling to display ads, IMHO. 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.
• gherkinnn 4y ago
  It is a question of quality. I'll take anything that is well written and insightful. 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-the-expert-beginner/ https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th... 1 - https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/ https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
• rayusher 4y ago
  Most content creators are moving to video because they can monetize the information.
• chairmanwow1 4y ago
  I have been in a recent period of intense non-fiction book reading recently (6 / month for past 3 months) and I realized a couple of things: 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)
  • vorpalhex 4y ago
    I've been on a kick of reading parenting books. I do a thing when I read where I fact check books when I read them (only things which are claims, usually only if cited or very specific). 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.
    • thumbelina 4y ago
      Any parenting books you recommend? Thanks!
      • thanatropism 4y ago
• antegamisou 4y ago
  Bluntly put; the vast majority of blog posts, no matter what the subject is about, are low quality platitudes. This has been the norm ever since Blogger/Wordpress emerged. 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.
• null_object 4y ago
  I find that some days, when I'm tired at the end of the day or drained by work, I crave some simple entertainment and come to HN or my RSS reader looking for articles or blog-posts to read, but I'm definitely finding that the RSS-feed has thinned-out, and on HN there's more often repetition of posts I've seen before or lynchmob ranting about Apple which I find unnerving. 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.
  • tapanjk 4y ago
    > 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.
• QXAS 4y ago
  I'd rather be lost in a good book instead of lost in Netflix trying to make a choice out of the endless mediocre options. 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.
• z3t4 4y ago
  Books are the new web. Publishing books have never been easier. Getting people to pay to read is easier - you do not have to rely on ads, there are no popups, or trackers, only cookie crumbs, and maybe some margin notes.
• JohnBooty 4y ago
  Are we slowly losing a joy of reading blog post because there are so many? Yes, but... What are your thoughts? I think it's inarguable: 99.x% of blog posts are trash, and a lot of that trash is specifically SEO-bait trash where the author wasn't even trying to produce something of value. 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.
  • Georgelemental 4y ago
    If everyone followed your solution, nobody would ever read any interesting blog posts!
    • qup 4y ago
      Since that isn't the case, and never will be, the solution is really great.
    • JohnBooty 4y ago
      I guess now that I think about it, there's also a small subset of blogs I actively follow, having previously discovered them via (1) or (2).
• naravara 4y ago
  > 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? 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.
• runjake 4y ago
  I feel the opposite. I'm reading fewer non-fiction books and more articles and blog posts. 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.
  • firemelt 4y ago
    >A huge time-saver has been reading the article versions of stuff that has been turned into a book. like what? any example?
  • xiphias2 4y ago
    I love to see presentations of people on youtube who write non-fiction books. It gives back their personality as well and it's a great middle ground between articles and books.
    • mongol 4y ago
      Searching for "topic + lecture" on Youtube gives me the best hits. I rather hear a knowledgable person just talk about a topic, than some poorly animated storytelling about the same thing, done by a Youtuber with shallow knowledge
      • icepat 4y ago
        It's the YouTube equivalent of hitting up Google Scholar, rather than regular google for information. I also really recommend using Google Scholar for anything technical. You skip blog spam, and end up with better and more informative stuff.
      • xiphias2 4y ago
        That's probably great as well, but I'm talking about searching for a book author. Just for example Clean Code is a great book, but the presentation is so much better: https://youtu.be/7EmboKQH8lM https://youtu.be/7EmboKQH8lM
• kobaroko 4y ago
  Books have just problem: time. Tim from the idea until it gets out from the print. A lot of things can happen in meantime that are not reflected in books.
• deephdave 4y ago
  Thanks to Readup[1], Matter[2] and Campfire reads reading club[3], I still read a few articles. [1]https://readup.org/ https://readup.org/ [2]https://web.getmatter.app/ https://web.getmatter.app/ [3]https://t.me/campfire_reads https://t.me/campfire_reads
• jklinger410 4y ago
  The gate-keeping around reading is insane. 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.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    I'd say that most of the distinction between books and blogs / other online writing is about the process and result rather than of the physical form of the product itself, though that has some bearing (see my recent comments elsewhere in this thread). 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. <https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/ https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/>
• anotheraccount9 4y ago
  I suspect you will maintain your IQ longer by reading books instead of online articles.
• LunarAurora 4y ago
  It is not just about the numbers. There are more books produced than ever. 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) [1] https://longreads.com/ https://longreads.com/ [2] https://hn.lindylearn.io/ https://hn.lindylearn.io/
• yannis 4y ago
  Looking back in my life, very few habits stayed with me over the years. One is to wake up early in the morning; read non-fiction books; Use TeX\LaTeX for writing. I read on average a book every 3-5 days. I read mostly during the early morning or late evening. I occasionally read the odd blog post. They serve different purpose.
• brontosaurusrex 4y ago
  Some 'latest' books I actually enjoyed: 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 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
• steve_slammin 4y ago
  As somebody in Data Science/Predictive Modeling, it's almost entirely useless to read blog posts unless they come from some stellar blogger like say Andrew Gelman. Do a search on any topic, you get a ludicrous list of 'Towards Data Science' posts from kids who learned maybe 30% of what they're talking about over the course of writing the article. Books for me, thanks.
• syl_sau 4y ago
  The good things about books is they compel you to truly engage in an argument, an idea, a conception of the world. You can't opt out easily, and that means you ought to be focused. And that's incredibly important, because quality almost always mean quantity. Not only the amount of knowledge in the average book far surpasses 90% of what's on the web, but more importantly information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy to digest, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level: you're losing the attention war waged against your brain.
• sibeliuss 4y ago
  For me its easy: Sitting on the computer reading makes me feel depressed. Reading books makes me feel happy. And so I've gradually reduced my footprint on the internet to basically zero -- no social media, only a few sites (mostly HN) bookmarked -- in an effort to make the internet less of a thing. It's working. 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.
  • sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Exactly what I've felt. I have started a new project for tennis, and that keeps me going. Reading a book about topics that I need for project, exploring different ideas, etc. What I found most interesting is that reading a book opens up a totally different world of thinking. More ideas, enrichment of creative thinking, clear thinking, focus... I was sitting in front of computer and try to think what to do next, while ending in endless worthless SM scrolling... I can feel you :)
  • padobson 4y ago
    +1 for getting away from the screen. I've stopped buying eBooks for exactly this reason. A glass of wine or bourbon and a book with a soft lamp is a much better way to power down at the end of the day then doom scrolling or vegetating to Netflix. It is a lonely thing though, so YMMV when considering your spouse or roommates.
    • theonething 4y ago
      Something I like about ebooks though is the ability to change font size and other things. My eye sight is not that great even with glasses so I've found the ability to change font size to my liking and comfort indispensable. When I read an ebook, I still feel a marked difference (overall much more relaxing and better) than reading a web page.
    • DoingSomeThings 4y ago
      I've found that Kindle gives me the same effect as physical books. For narrative-driven fiction specifically & light non-fiction. Physical still wins out for reference material and things I need to flip around. 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.
• jyriand 4y ago
  "Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap". It was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic, and was inspired by his observation that, while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, most work in other fields was low-quality too, and so science fiction was thus no different." [0] 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
• ploum 4y ago
  That’s why I used Pocket and now Offpunk (disclaimer: it’s my own project). 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/ https://sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk/
  • nafizh 4y ago
    If you can connect it to pinboard, that would be something really big.
    • ploum 4y ago
      If pinboard offers a RSS feed, then it’s already connectable.
• seniorThrowaway 4y ago
  The quality of content on the internet has gone way down in my opinion. There is a proliferation of content that is so adwords optimized as to be useless, AI or cheapest content farm written, an annoying ad filled video, or some combination of all of those. It's still ok for computing and programming topics, but for almost any other non-fiction or reference type material I greatly prefer books, and older books at that. Not antique books, but even those from about 20 years ago still have much more content and better editing. I'm speaking of topics like gardening, homesteading, military history etc.
  • adql 4y ago
    Counter-point - it didn't, SEO services quality went up. 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.
• mancerayder 4y ago
  I find it difficult to read online in depth. 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.
• yogthos 4y ago
  I find that I read both. Web articles can be useful for keeping up with recent news or tech developments. However, books are excellent for doing a deep dive into a subject. I started to reserve at least an hour for book reading every day, and now it's become a habit.
• IcyHordr 4y ago
  Couldn't one argue that a book would likely have better writing in it as opposed to a blog post? Maybe what you're really saying is you like good writing now, and you used not like it as much?
• mr_gibbins 4y ago
  Do you think it's something to do with the medium, rather than the content? 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.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    A good e-ink reader ... remains a compromise ... but it is a good compromise in many cases. 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).
• luis_cho 4y ago
  Try to buy a kobo and connect with your getpocket (firefox read it later). 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
• master_yoda_1 4y ago
  its depend on what domain you are interested in. for some domain progress is so fast books are lagging 10 years behind so you need to read article (also its tough to find good article).
• dieselgate 4y ago
  Interesting to see this on HN as we're all encouraged to read the post before commenting here but it's certainly relevant. Some articles are so fascinating I can't help but read them - for example discoveries that push back the "known date of human arrival to ${location}" or whatever. Maybe OP is experiencing exhaustion of the screen medium, which if the case hope you are able to do what works best for you reading-wise!
• MengerSponge 4y ago
  I spend a lot of time listening to ebooks on Libby. I also read a lot more with my Kobo (managed via Calibre). The only blog posts that I read diligently and thoroughly are Bartosz Ciechanowski's masterworks: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
• tristor 4y ago
  I only read fiction or low-density non-fiction books now, any of the denser non-fiction books that aren't considered classics usually are full of fluff. For that, I heavily rely on Blinkist, which is basically like Cliff Notes as an audiobook. 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.
• georgex7 4y ago
  Same
• powersnail 4y ago
  My conjecture is two folds: 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.
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I've been foregoing books more and more, and just reading papers. Concept in compsci I want to understand? Why bother with a university text where I can just freely grab the pdf (inevitably from the 70s and 80s) and just dig into that? It has more detail and more context.
• agrimonyhal 4y ago
  Non-fiction books are a great way to “catch up” on a mature topic (Chinese history, physics). 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.
• cleandreams 4y ago
  I feel happier reading a book. I also feel relieved when I open a book. I've been wondering why this is and I have a theory. 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.)
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    The number and quality of online distractions is ... increasingly tiresome. 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.)
• desdo88 4y ago
  Quite the opposite, I at least enjoy reading both books and blogs. But I will agree that I'm starting to notice books getting more popular. My friend has almost ditched her phone and is spending her free time mostly by reading books.
• wtf77 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  I'm just so jaded by articlespam that my brain automatically shuts off when it sees large blocks of text onscreen. 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.
• atmb4u 4y ago
  https://lostgarden.com https://lostgarden.com https://fs.blog https://fs.blog 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.
• ultrablack 4y ago
  Im reading this… :/
• nerdface 4y ago
  Interesting because I’ve been doing the same these last few months; getting back into physical books. I find there’s so much more peace and focus in reading a book vs scrolling the Internet. I don’t think our minds were supposed to have so many distractions communicated through a backlit medium.
• goleary 4y ago
  I listened to a great episode of the Ezra Klein show about "Deep reading". (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...) 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.
• GulpGulp 4y ago
  I think for me there is just so much garbage out there that it's not worth it to me to even read enough to find out if it's any good.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  For those commenting on the number of low-quality books out there, Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book is a useful guide to detecting those quickly: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book 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-reading-list-from-how-to-read-a-book/ https://www.tosummarise.com/2022/11/26/mortimer-adlers-readi...>
• Paraesthetic 4y ago
  What are books? I haven't read them since I was a child - now I only read blog posts and articles.
• mitjam 4y ago
  I read more than ever overall - both articles and books. I also dislike fluff-stuffed books and I adjust by skimming over such parts. Although I am never sure if I miss important points, I think it is better than wasting time on non-content. The same is true for online articles. 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.
• readonthegoapp 4y ago
  i feel like blog posts, like those on substack, medium, etc., are so low-quality that i barely make it a sentence or two before abandoning them. 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.
• leoplct 4y ago
  It is certainly possible that the sheer quantity of online content available on the internet today has led to a saturation of information, making it difficult for individuals to find articles and blog posts that are truly worth their time. Additionally, the fast-paced, scrollable format of most online content can make it less engaging and immersive than traditional print reading. 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.