7 ms·

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

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
peepee1982 4y ago
I feel like this really depends on the topic. 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.
- CodeIsMyFetish 4y ago
  Couldn't agree more. And with tools such as Photoshop, it's much more efficient to learn as you go after being able to understand enough to navigate around the tool and its basic associated terminology.
  - 30minAdayHN 4y ago
    I thought similarly about those books. But I was proven wrong after I read Scott Kelby's Lightroom book. The added value was understanding one author's workflow and also knowing what all features exist. Of course, one might say we can just google for all the features of Lightroom - but I personally never did that and book helped me learn all the superset of features. After that, I never referred to the book - I just google about specific things, now that I know what is out there. There was once a discussion about reading programming books and similar point was made about learning on the go. One HN'er pointed out that reading end to end helps to know what all exists. It resonated strongly with me and since then, when I start on a new topic - I make sure to read at least one book end to end.
    - jq-r 4y ago
      Agreed. Any sufficiently complex tool needs a good explanation of it's workflow. I was using Photoshop occasionally for years, but when I saw how people use it in real life (the photoshop guys episodes were great) a lot of stuff clicked and made much more sense so it was way easier to use.
    - peepee1982 4y ago
cryptos 4y ago
A good example for such a bloated book is "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin. The ideas of the book are more or less completely explained in a single blog post or one of his talks (about 1 hour), but the book has a few hundred pages (432) where he delves into history and talks to you about how he used archaic computers 40 years ago (to render himself as a veteran and to underline some point in the main text). Another book on the same topic (https://www.packtpub.com/product/get-your-hands-dirty-on-clean-architecture/9781839211966 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.
- locofocos 4y ago
  Is this a good example of one of those talks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dKZ-dWaCiU&ab_channel=ITkonekt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dKZ-dWaCiU&ab_channel=ITkon...
  - axiomdata316 4y ago
    For some reason that example reminded me of this example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTkw9WOzhDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTkw9WOzhDs
  - cryptos 4y ago
    Yes, this is one of those talks. The book doesn't really cover much more.
- azemetre 4y ago
  Have you read the packtpub book? I'm very weary on buying from that publisher as I gotten burned too many times. IME they are often both poorly written and horridly incorrect. This was around 2018-ish so maybe they've gotten better but they definitely have the "self publish" stigma with little editorial guidance in my view. Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing content.
  - 4y ago
radu_floricica 4y ago
This, 10 times. I have such good blogs in my inbox, with easily the quality of the best books I could read, and I don't even have time to go though them. And I don't see any that I'd like to remove - if anything, I'm sure I could easily add to them if I go through each one's blogroll. 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.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Huh. I can’t take AstralCodexTen, because it’s so long-winded!
- vchynarov 4y ago
  I’m constantly astonished “Thinking Fast and Slow” is so highly recommended - I question if the advocates actually read the book in depth. 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.
  - radu_floricica 4y ago
    At least Fast and Slow had half a dozen concepts. Well, imagine that Noise is also book sized, but only has one concept to present.
itake 4y ago
While I agree books have bloat, spending 4 minutes to read a blog article once makes it more difficult for me to retain the information. Books typically discuss ideas (over multiple days of reading) which helps me retain their information better. Do you have any advice on how to retain blog posts better? Re-read them everyday for a few days?
Sakos 4y ago
I consume information in whatever information it's available and whatever way I prefer at any given time. Even a Twitter thread can be a valuable source of information. I'm not going to ignore it just because it's Twitter. Some things I'm only able to find in books. Other things are great as articles because you don't need a book to explain a single concept. Even a book is just a whole made of chapters and indices and some chapters are more useful than others. I haven't read a non-fiction book cover-to-cover in years (or ever?). Sometimes a Reddit post is valuable because of all the information in the comments (eg. "the real TIL is always in the comments"). Sometimes I'll read a handful of notes from somebody's knowledge database and that's all I need. Sometimes I'll read all of them. I can't imagine limiting myself to a single type of textual presentation.
gonehome 4y ago
It really depends - for most crappy non-fiction I'd agree, but the really great ones are different. 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.
keiferski 4y ago
I don’t know exactly when it happened, but nonfiction books have become 80% filler with a few dozen pages of worthwhile ideas. This didn’t use to be the case and if you read a popular book from say, 1910, they are often too information sense.
- a3w 4y ago
  American non-fiction books seem to have a third dedicated to "the author is awesome and valid in this field, because he or she did this and that talk for this and that person". Very bloaty, indeed.
- operatingthetan 4y ago
  I agree, but I think some aspect of it is that we are presented the same facts as novel in each genre and if you've read one you've read them all. Whatever the case it's to the point where I quit nonfiction books quickly because I find them boring, where as I used to read them constantly when I was younger.
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  I have heard non-fiction authors comment on this. It is because there is no market for a pamphlet or novella length work. In science, self help and business people often write influential essays or academic papers. It may make sense to print them because want them as a reference, and the author can expand their ideas. But the problem is that in general they don't need to be ~250 pages.
- Aaronstotle 4y ago
  I've been a huge fan of Erik Larson's book because he writes non-fiction in a very exciting ways where it doesn't feel like filler. The Splendid & the Vile was the most enjoyable book of his imo.
- keiferski 4y ago
  * dense
allturtles 4y ago
> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. 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.
- ckozlowski 4y ago
  Incidentally, I was given a copy of Peltzold's "Code", second edition (2022), for Christmas. I'd read the first many, many years ago. I'm looking forward to reading it again.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    It's a fantastic book. I'm surprised universities don't assign it in introduction courses.
    - sss111 4y ago
      We actually used this book as part of our CS curriculum in my undergrad at Georgia Tech!
- DoingSomeThings 4y ago
  Re "Epic Fantasy" 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-of-creating-epic-fantasy/ 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."
briga 4y ago
I think you might be reading the wrong books. Admittedly many of the latest nonfiction books (especially tech books) are 90% fluff, but this is hardly universal
distrill 4y ago
Books are also stuck in time. I like Ben Thompson's position here (Stratechery) - his ideas are moving so quickly that he doesn't want to have them stuck in time in a book. He publishes a lot of content and regularly goes back and posts updates to his ways of thinking. I guess you can approximate this with new book editions, but there will always be outdated published versions in circulation without updated context. Ben keeps old articles as they are but includes links to updated articles.
- camoufleur 4y ago
  "Stuck in time" is a positive. Why should I pay attention to a writer who's constantly changing their mind and retracting their work?
  - neoromantique 4y ago
    That he is staying up to date in the ever changing landscape that is tech field?
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. 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?
jtsnow 4y ago
"So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself. 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. https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/
ajmurmann 4y ago
I'm on the fence about this. For the longest time I'd have 100% agreed with you, but more recently realized that there is value in just having my mind be exposed to the subject for a prolonged amount of time. Sometimes the more interesting insights will be mine, rather than what the content of the book was. It also helps with retention. Of course some books just still aren't worth it. My canonical positive example would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is a very high bar and obvious example.
- dinkleberg 4y ago
  I completely agree with this. 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.
  - sasha_fishter 4y ago
    Try to read a 'How to read a book', it's not easy one, but it explain what you just said.
pnf 4y ago
That's true for most nonfiction with the caveat that you miss out on the lingering mood of a full book if all you get are the executive summaries. It is definitely not true for works of genius, which should be ready in full, if possible. Also, textbooks or instructional guides that build over each chapter lose a lot when turned into a series of shorter, discontiguous blog posts
dvirsky 4y ago
I feel the same way about a lot of non fiction, but not all. 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.
- groby_b 4y ago
  TBF, Malcolm Gladwell is more fiction that is "inspired by a true story". It's fun to read only if you aren't familiar with the subject. Otherwise, you just want to yell. 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 :)
Barrin92 4y ago
>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 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.
- opdahl 4y ago
  I can’t agree more with what you’re describing. Just working over the information over time, poking at the nuances of a way of thinking is almost impossible through a short article.
snidane 4y ago
Another trick is to search the book title on youtube. There is a fair chance the author wants to promote the book and delivers the entire message in one hour speech in their own words instead of in hundreds of fluffed pages in the book. You can decide if you would like the buy book after watching the video.
agrimonyhal 4y ago
The quality and quantity of blogs has increased so much that many books seem too cumbersome in comparison. 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.
svillar 4y ago
Check out Blinkist.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Non-fiction books that intend to teach something (as opposed to just share something) are a waste of time. This is particularly true for business books where you might get 2 nuggets of wisdom hidden in 300 pages of the same old fluff. 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.
nicbou 4y ago
Non-fiction books really shine when it's okay to take it slow. 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.
jvans 4y ago
> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff 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
aflag 4y ago
That's true of bad books. But bad blog posts are even worse: they are trying to get maximum SEO. Both good posts and books are useful. When I'm getting introduced to a subject, I like books. The slower pace allows me to gradually become more familiar with the ideas and concepts. Also, good authors will put a lot of effort in writing something that's pleasant to read and that still goes through editors so that the end result is pure joy. Blog posts can be good, but I don't think they ever get to the same level of quality of a good book. 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.
muzani 4y ago
I'm a compulsive note taker. I find that most practical style books can be shortened into a 10th of the size. 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.

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

peepee1982 4y ago

I feel like this really depends on the topic. 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.

CodeIsMyFetish 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. And with tools such as Photoshop, it's much more efficient to learn as you go after being able to understand enough to navigate around the tool and its basic associated terminology.
- 30minAdayHN 4y ago
  I thought similarly about those books. But I was proven wrong after I read Scott Kelby's Lightroom book. The added value was understanding one author's workflow and also knowing what all features exist. Of course, one might say we can just google for all the features of Lightroom - but I personally never did that and book helped me learn all the superset of features. After that, I never referred to the book - I just google about specific things, now that I know what is out there. There was once a discussion about reading programming books and similar point was made about learning on the go. One HN'er pointed out that reading end to end helps to know what all exists. It resonated strongly with me and since then, when I start on a new topic - I make sure to read at least one book end to end.
  - jq-r 4y ago
    Agreed. Any sufficiently complex tool needs a good explanation of it's workflow. I was using Photoshop occasionally for years, but when I saw how people use it in real life (the photoshop guys episodes were great) a lot of stuff clicked and made much more sense so it was way easier to use.
  - peepee1982 4y ago

cryptos 4y ago

A good example for such a bloated book is "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin. The ideas of the book are more or less completely explained in a single blog post or one of his talks (about 1 hour), but the book has a few hundred pages (432) where he delves into history and talks to you about how he used archaic computers 40 years ago (to render himself as a veteran and to underline some point in the main text). Another book on the same topic (https://www.packtpub.com/product/get-your-hands-dirty-on-clean-architecture/9781839211966 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.

locofocos 4y ago
Is this a good example of one of those talks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dKZ-dWaCiU&ab_channel=ITkonekt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dKZ-dWaCiU&ab_channel=ITkon...
- axiomdata316 4y ago
  For some reason that example reminded me of this example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTkw9WOzhDs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTkw9WOzhDs
- cryptos 4y ago
  Yes, this is one of those talks. The book doesn't really cover much more.
azemetre 4y ago
Have you read the packtpub book? I'm very weary on buying from that publisher as I gotten burned too many times. IME they are often both poorly written and horridly incorrect. This was around 2018-ish so maybe they've gotten better but they definitely have the "self publish" stigma with little editorial guidance in my view. Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing content.
- 4y ago

radu_floricica 4y ago

This, 10 times. I have such good blogs in my inbox, with easily the quality of the best books I could read, and I don't even have time to go though them. And I don't see any that I'd like to remove - if anything, I'm sure I could easily add to them if I go through each one's blogroll. 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.

wrycoder 4y ago
Huh. I can’t take AstralCodexTen, because it’s so long-winded!
vchynarov 4y ago
I’m constantly astonished “Thinking Fast and Slow” is so highly recommended - I question if the advocates actually read the book in depth. 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.
- radu_floricica 4y ago
  At least Fast and Slow had half a dozen concepts. Well, imagine that Noise is also book sized, but only has one concept to present.

itake 4y ago

While I agree books have bloat, spending 4 minutes to read a blog article once makes it more difficult for me to retain the information. Books typically discuss ideas (over multiple days of reading) which helps me retain their information better. Do you have any advice on how to retain blog posts better? Re-read them everyday for a few days?

Sakos 4y ago

I consume information in whatever information it's available and whatever way I prefer at any given time. Even a Twitter thread can be a valuable source of information. I'm not going to ignore it just because it's Twitter. Some things I'm only able to find in books. Other things are great as articles because you don't need a book to explain a single concept. Even a book is just a whole made of chapters and indices and some chapters are more useful than others. I haven't read a non-fiction book cover-to-cover in years (or ever?). Sometimes a Reddit post is valuable because of all the information in the comments (eg. "the real TIL is always in the comments"). Sometimes I'll read a handful of notes from somebody's knowledge database and that's all I need. Sometimes I'll read all of them. I can't imagine limiting myself to a single type of textual presentation.

gonehome 4y ago

It really depends - for most crappy non-fiction I'd agree, but the really great ones are different. 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.

keiferski 4y ago

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but nonfiction books have become 80% filler with a few dozen pages of worthwhile ideas. This didn’t use to be the case and if you read a popular book from say, 1910, they are often too information sense.

a3w 4y ago
American non-fiction books seem to have a third dedicated to "the author is awesome and valid in this field, because he or she did this and that talk for this and that person". Very bloaty, indeed.
operatingthetan 4y ago
I agree, but I think some aspect of it is that we are presented the same facts as novel in each genre and if you've read one you've read them all. Whatever the case it's to the point where I quit nonfiction books quickly because I find them boring, where as I used to read them constantly when I was younger.
georgeecollins 4y ago
I have heard non-fiction authors comment on this. It is because there is no market for a pamphlet or novella length work. In science, self help and business people often write influential essays or academic papers. It may make sense to print them because want them as a reference, and the author can expand their ideas. But the problem is that in general they don't need to be ~250 pages.
Aaronstotle 4y ago
I've been a huge fan of Erik Larson's book because he writes non-fiction in a very exciting ways where it doesn't feel like filler. The Splendid & the Vile was the most enjoyable book of his imo.
keiferski 4y ago
* dense

allturtles 4y ago

> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. 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.

ckozlowski 4y ago
Incidentally, I was given a copy of Peltzold's "Code", second edition (2022), for Christmas. I'd read the first many, many years ago. I'm looking forward to reading it again.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  It's a fantastic book. I'm surprised universities don't assign it in introduction courses.
  - sss111 4y ago
    We actually used this book as part of our CS curriculum in my undergrad at Georgia Tech!
DoingSomeThings 4y ago
Re "Epic Fantasy" 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-of-creating-epic-fantasy/ 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."

briga 4y ago

I think you might be reading the wrong books. Admittedly many of the latest nonfiction books (especially tech books) are 90% fluff, but this is hardly universal

distrill 4y ago

Books are also stuck in time. I like Ben Thompson's position here (Stratechery) - his ideas are moving so quickly that he doesn't want to have them stuck in time in a book. He publishes a lot of content and regularly goes back and posts updates to his ways of thinking. I guess you can approximate this with new book editions, but there will always be outdated published versions in circulation without updated context. Ben keeps old articles as they are but includes links to updated articles.

camoufleur 4y ago
"Stuck in time" is a positive. Why should I pay attention to a writer who's constantly changing their mind and retracting their work?
- neoromantique 4y ago
  That he is staying up to date in the ever changing landscape that is tech field?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. 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?

jtsnow 4y ago

"So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself. 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. https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/ https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

ajmurmann 4y ago

I'm on the fence about this. For the longest time I'd have 100% agreed with you, but more recently realized that there is value in just having my mind be exposed to the subject for a prolonged amount of time. Sometimes the more interesting insights will be mine, rather than what the content of the book was. It also helps with retention. Of course some books just still aren't worth it. My canonical positive example would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is a very high bar and obvious example.

dinkleberg 4y ago
I completely agree with this. 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.
- sasha_fishter 4y ago
  Try to read a 'How to read a book', it's not easy one, but it explain what you just said.

pnf 4y ago

That's true for most nonfiction with the caveat that you miss out on the lingering mood of a full book if all you get are the executive summaries. It is definitely not true for works of genius, which should be ready in full, if possible. Also, textbooks or instructional guides that build over each chapter lose a lot when turned into a series of shorter, discontiguous blog posts

dvirsky 4y ago

I feel the same way about a lot of non fiction, but not all. 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.

groby_b 4y ago
TBF, Malcolm Gladwell is more fiction that is "inspired by a true story". It's fun to read only if you aren't familiar with the subject. Otherwise, you just want to yell. 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 :)

Barrin92 4y ago

>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 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.

opdahl 4y ago
I can’t agree more with what you’re describing. Just working over the information over time, poking at the nuances of a way of thinking is almost impossible through a short article.

snidane 4y ago

Another trick is to search the book title on youtube. There is a fair chance the author wants to promote the book and delivers the entire message in one hour speech in their own words instead of in hundreds of fluffed pages in the book. You can decide if you would like the buy book after watching the video.

agrimonyhal 4y ago

The quality and quantity of blogs has increased so much that many books seem too cumbersome in comparison. 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.

svillar 4y ago

Check out Blinkist.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Non-fiction books that intend to teach something (as opposed to just share something) are a waste of time. This is particularly true for business books where you might get 2 nuggets of wisdom hidden in 300 pages of the same old fluff. 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.

nicbou 4y ago

Non-fiction books really shine when it's okay to take it slow. 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.

jvans 4y ago

> Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff 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

aflag 4y ago

That's true of bad books. But bad blog posts are even worse: they are trying to get maximum SEO. Both good posts and books are useful. When I'm getting introduced to a subject, I like books. The slower pace allows me to gradually become more familiar with the ideas and concepts. Also, good authors will put a lot of effort in writing something that's pleasant to read and that still goes through editors so that the end result is pure joy. Blog posts can be good, but I don't think they ever get to the same level of quality of a good book. 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.

muzani 4y ago

I'm a compulsive note taker. I find that most practical style books can be shortened into a 10th of the size. 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.