3 ms·

Why do we still prize books so much? It's just a media format. I've gone from always having a 'WIP' book in my late teens to reading 2-3 books a year nowadays.

Why do we still prize books so much? It's just a media format. I've gone from always having a 'WIP' book in my late teens to reading 2-3 books a year nowadays. I don't read less though - just more of it comes from blogs. The feeling I get from non-fiction books is that, whatever actionables the book pitched, you can put them into practice after reading a few summaries. This does not apply to fiction. Reading lengthy descriptions of scenes, keeping track of a lengthy plot+subplots, characters, etc seem like brain workouts. My main gripe is this: most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text. Images help - a lot. Why do hold books on a pedestal? PD: I've tried looking for (without any luck) an article where the author compares book maximalism nowadays to oral-tradition-ear folks who may have argued books couldn't quite convey the message as well as an oral story.

ifgtmylstone 3y ago
Probably because of the time invested in reading a book. It really re-wires your thinking on a topic if you're on it for 3-4 hours rather than 3-4 minutes.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Non-fiction books aren't just about "transmitting great ideas" but also transmitting vast amounts of detail about more niche things. Take ancient history, for example: it is common for books run to many hundreds of pages, but that length was necessary to cover both political events and everyday life, to go over all the evidence a historian relies on to reconstruct the past, to treat disputes among experts, etc. You just aren't going to find the same amount of detail in a single place on blogs.
kragen 3y ago
well, i have an irrational fondness for the media format, because it's a media format that has given me a lot of pleasure. also, though, while i don't read as many books as i used to either, i still think they're actually the best format for some things i am puzzled by this statement that 'most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text'. do you mean that the total of the world's great ideas add up to less than 200 pages? or do you mean that each individual idea takes less than 200 pages? enormously less, i'd think; i would argue that each great idea in knuth's taocp is about half a page, but there are several thousand of them, one right after the other, boom boom boom i do not think you can put all the ideas in taocp into action after reading a few summaries, or indeed after reading the series from beginning to end without stopping. you have to do the exercises and think about things a lot. books are really good at pausing and rewinding, and they support annotation well if you spend 100 hours reading blogs and 100 hours doing exercises from taocp (and reading the text preceding the exercises) you will find that your skills improve enormously more in the second 100 hours. this is because reading things doesn't improve your skills then the question is, why do exercises from a book instead of from a blog or something? and the answer is that the required blogs don't seem to exist. the closest thing is something like khan academy, but they only cover super basic stuff. naturally, ebooks are perfectly fine for this, and a lot more portable, but paper books have larger screens than portable computers that weigh more pictures are of course wonderful, and taocp in particular would be better with more of them. and for things like how to grout tile, how to dance contact improv, how a dobby loom works, or how people are being burned alive, books are grossly inadequate, and other media like video are much better books are also nice for reference purposes but wikipedia is usually better for stuff that's slightly mainstream there's a factor of how much effort is involved. a 256-page book might take you three hours to read, but only a person-year to write. a community of practice of, i don't know, 2000 user-interface researchers can write books (or blogs) about their area of user interface research or whatever faster than you can possibly read all of them. the only lazier medium is livestreaming, where three hours of some dipshit yelling at the camera produces three hours of content. a three-hour movie, by contrast, takes hundreds of person-years, so such movies only exist when someone can be persuaded to risk a fortune on their commercial prospects. 2000 makeup artists, puppeteers, actors, digital cgi artists, etc., can make maybe six such movies a year, most of which you'd still regret watching it sort of sounds like you're not looking for what i would call 'ideas', which is to say, mental tools that make you more powerful. you are looking for a slick salesman type to 'pitch' you 'actionables', which is to say, to manipulate you into doing what they want with some kind of emotional rhetoric and a call to action. canonical examples include televangelists, carnival barkers, ted talks, and literally hitler. to me your desire seems pathological, like cutting yourself to get relief from mental anguish, because the actionables he will pitch you are for his benefit, not yours. you're seeking to be abused and exploited. i hope you get better and learn to slam the door in the faces of people who pitch you actionables instead of seeking them out
j7ake 3y ago
For many readers, the point is not to get information as quickly as possible. It’s about spending time in somebody else’s mind (non fiction) or in somebody’s world (fiction). Analogously, meditation is about the act of being with yourself at the present. Yes you can learn some actionable things along the way but that is not the point.
- qiine 3y ago
  "spending time in somebody else’s mind" Really interesting concept
- ssivark 3y ago
  Well put. To extend that — a related reason for me to read is to simply use the author’s thoughts (or a certain flavor of music) as a “prop” for priming me into a certain headspace — so I can actually think about a certain topic. A book might be very useful in this light even if I disagree with a lot of what the author says, if it acts as stimulus for me to develop my own thinking. There isn’t any particular reason to hurry through the book before I’ve had the chance to think deeply enough Most content is crap and getting through it fast enough doesn’t really increase its value. The right content, otoh, is worth spending a lot of time immersed in.
cristeigabriel 3y ago
> Why do hold books on a pedestal? Maybe my opinion on this is negative due to my Eastern European upbringing, but I would say it's because it's something often seen as painful (think of a thick book with a dense vocabulary, being more scary rather than appealing to the majority of people), and, people are OK with wasting time if it involves pain, it gives the impression of a more honest attempt to achieve something, and books are the go-to for the majority of people who judge whether somebody is being productive or not.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  No. Reading is not painful, it's awesome. I wish I had more time to spend doing it. The older I get the better I appreciate truly good writing. Spending time with the language of Moby Dick or the living characters of War and Peace was an absolute pleasure. It has everything to do with the experience, and nothing to do with "being seen reading a thick book." I'm not on Instagram or Tik Tok with images of me reading. I'm reading because I want the experience and actually enjoy it.
  - cristeigabriel 3y ago
    I did not make a statement on reading, but on social perception where I'm from. Reading is nice, I have many thick books myself and I love(d) them, and it's a sustainable hobby in my perspective of social relations because the majority of people here tend to have a negative experience with reading, not being a thing of their own volition, but a requirement, especially on content they don't even care about. Therefore, if, say, you're a child, and your parents see you reading, they're less likely to throw a fit than if you were playing Counter Strike or something.
    - slowmovintarget 3y ago
      Gotcha. Sorry if I misunderstood that. Yeah, kiddo is allowed to read as much as desired, but video games are not allowed. (I'm a gamer, but my wife now hates the hobby with a passion. She was ambivalent until we had a child.)
RamblingCTO 3y ago
Books aren't only about efficiency and knowledge transfer.

ifgtmylstone 3y ago

Probably because of the time invested in reading a book. It really re-wires your thinking on a topic if you're on it for 3-4 hours rather than 3-4 minutes.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Non-fiction books aren't just about "transmitting great ideas" but also transmitting vast amounts of detail about more niche things. Take ancient history, for example: it is common for books run to many hundreds of pages, but that length was necessary to cover both political events and everyday life, to go over all the evidence a historian relies on to reconstruct the past, to treat disputes among experts, etc. You just aren't going to find the same amount of detail in a single place on blogs.

kragen 3y ago

well, i have an irrational fondness for the media format, because it's a media format that has given me a lot of pleasure. also, though, while i don't read as many books as i used to either, i still think they're actually the best format for some things i am puzzled by this statement that 'most great ideas can be transmitted in less than 200 pages of text'. do you mean that the total of the world's great ideas add up to less than 200 pages? or do you mean that each individual idea takes less than 200 pages? enormously less, i'd think; i would argue that each great idea in knuth's taocp is about half a page, but there are several thousand of them, one right after the other, boom boom boom i do not think you can put all the ideas in taocp into action after reading a few summaries, or indeed after reading the series from beginning to end without stopping. you have to do the exercises and think about things a lot. books are really good at pausing and rewinding, and they support annotation well if you spend 100 hours reading blogs and 100 hours doing exercises from taocp (and reading the text preceding the exercises) you will find that your skills improve enormously more in the second 100 hours. this is because reading things doesn't improve your skills then the question is, why do exercises from a book instead of from a blog or something? and the answer is that the required blogs don't seem to exist. the closest thing is something like khan academy, but they only cover super basic stuff. naturally, ebooks are perfectly fine for this, and a lot more portable, but paper books have larger screens than portable computers that weigh more pictures are of course wonderful, and taocp in particular would be better with more of them. and for things like how to grout tile, how to dance contact improv, how a dobby loom works, or how people are being burned alive, books are grossly inadequate, and other media like video are much better books are also nice for reference purposes but wikipedia is usually better for stuff that's slightly mainstream there's a factor of how much effort is involved. a 256-page book might take you three hours to read, but only a person-year to write. a community of practice of, i don't know, 2000 user-interface researchers can write books (or blogs) about their area of user interface research or whatever faster than you can possibly read all of them. the only lazier medium is livestreaming, where three hours of some dipshit yelling at the camera produces three hours of content. a three-hour movie, by contrast, takes hundreds of person-years, so such movies only exist when someone can be persuaded to risk a fortune on their commercial prospects. 2000 makeup artists, puppeteers, actors, digital cgi artists, etc., can make maybe six such movies a year, most of which you'd still regret watching it sort of sounds like you're not looking for what i would call 'ideas', which is to say, mental tools that make you more powerful. you are looking for a slick salesman type to 'pitch' you 'actionables', which is to say, to manipulate you into doing what they want with some kind of emotional rhetoric and a call to action. canonical examples include televangelists, carnival barkers, ted talks, and literally hitler. to me your desire seems pathological, like cutting yourself to get relief from mental anguish, because the actionables he will pitch you are for his benefit, not yours. you're seeking to be abused and exploited. i hope you get better and learn to slam the door in the faces of people who pitch you actionables instead of seeking them out

j7ake 3y ago

For many readers, the point is not to get information as quickly as possible. It’s about spending time in somebody else’s mind (non fiction) or in somebody’s world (fiction). Analogously, meditation is about the act of being with yourself at the present. Yes you can learn some actionable things along the way but that is not the point.

qiine 3y ago
"spending time in somebody else’s mind" Really interesting concept
ssivark 3y ago
Well put. To extend that — a related reason for me to read is to simply use the author’s thoughts (or a certain flavor of music) as a “prop” for priming me into a certain headspace — so I can actually think about a certain topic. A book might be very useful in this light even if I disagree with a lot of what the author says, if it acts as stimulus for me to develop my own thinking. There isn’t any particular reason to hurry through the book before I’ve had the chance to think deeply enough Most content is crap and getting through it fast enough doesn’t really increase its value. The right content, otoh, is worth spending a lot of time immersed in.

cristeigabriel 3y ago

> Why do hold books on a pedestal? Maybe my opinion on this is negative due to my Eastern European upbringing, but I would say it's because it's something often seen as painful (think of a thick book with a dense vocabulary, being more scary rather than appealing to the majority of people), and, people are OK with wasting time if it involves pain, it gives the impression of a more honest attempt to achieve something, and books are the go-to for the majority of people who judge whether somebody is being productive or not.

slowmovintarget 3y ago
No. Reading is not painful, it's awesome. I wish I had more time to spend doing it. The older I get the better I appreciate truly good writing. Spending time with the language of Moby Dick or the living characters of War and Peace was an absolute pleasure. It has everything to do with the experience, and nothing to do with "being seen reading a thick book." I'm not on Instagram or Tik Tok with images of me reading. I'm reading because I want the experience and actually enjoy it.
- cristeigabriel 3y ago
  I did not make a statement on reading, but on social perception where I'm from. Reading is nice, I have many thick books myself and I love(d) them, and it's a sustainable hobby in my perspective of social relations because the majority of people here tend to have a negative experience with reading, not being a thing of their own volition, but a requirement, especially on content they don't even care about. Therefore, if, say, you're a child, and your parents see you reading, they're less likely to throw a fit than if you were playing Counter Strike or something.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    Gotcha. Sorry if I misunderstood that. Yeah, kiddo is allowed to read as much as desired, but video games are not allowed. (I'm a gamer, but my wife now hates the hobby with a passion. She was ambivalent until we had a child.)

RamblingCTO 3y ago

Books aren't only about efficiency and knowledge transfer.